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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of Forty Years of It, by Brand Whitlock
-
-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: Forty Years of It
-
-Author: Brand Whitlock
-
-Release Date: March 17, 2022 [eBook #67648]
-
-Language: English
-
-Produced by: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and 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 FORTY YEARS OF IT ***
-
-
-
-
-
-FORTY YEARS OF IT
-
-
-
-
-BY RALPH HENRY BARBOUR.
-
-  Benton’s Venture.
-  Around the End.
-  The Junior Trophy.
-  Change Signals!
-  For Yardley.
-  Finkler’s Field.
-  Winning His “Y.”
-  The New Boy at Hilltop.
-  Double Play.
-  Forward Pass!
-  The Spirit of the School.
-  Four in Camp.
-  Four Afoot.
-  Four Afloat.
-  The Arrival of Jimpson.
-  Behind the Line.
-  Captain of the Crew.
-  For the Honor of the School.
-  The Half-Back.
-  On Your Mark.
-  Weatherby’s Inning.
-
-D. APPLETON & COMPANY, NEW YORK.
-
-
-
-
-  FORTY
-  YEARS OF IT
-
-  BY
-  BRAND WHITLOCK
-
-  [Illustration]
-
-  NEW YORK AND LONDON
-  D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
-  MCMXIV
-
-
-
-
-  COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
-  D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
-
-  Copyright, 1913, by THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY
-
-  Printed in the United States of America
-
-
-
-
-  TO THE MEMORY OF
-  MY FATHER
-
-  ELIAS D. WHITLOCK
-
-  WHO DIED DECEMBER 23, 1913
-
-  A MINISTER OF THE SANCTUARY, AND
-  OF THE TRUE TABERNACLE, WHICH
-  THE LORD PITCHED, AND NOT MAN
-
-
-
-
-INTRODUCTION
-
-
-The history of democracy’s progress in a mid-Western city--so, to
-introduce this book in specific terms, one perhaps inevitably must
-call it. Yet in using the word _democracy_, one must plead for a
-distinction, or, better, a reversion, indicated by the curious
-anchylosis that, at a certain point in their maturity, usually sets in
-upon words newly put in use to express some august and large spiritual
-reality. We all know how this materializing tendency, if one may
-call it that, has affected our notion and our use of the commonest
-religious terms like _faith_, _grace_, _salvation_, for instance.
-Their connotation, originally fluid, spiritual and subjective, has
-become concrete, limited, partial, ignoble. So, too, in our common
-speech, even above the catchpenny vocabulary of the demagogue or
-politician, the word _democracy_ has taken on the limited, partial and
-ignoble connotation of more or less incidental and provisional forms
-of democracy’s practical outcome; or even of by-products not directly
-traceable to the action of democracy itself. How often, for example, do
-we see direct primaries, the single tax, the initiative and referendum
-posed in a kind of sacramental relation to “fundamental democracy”; or
-the “essential movement of democracy” measured, say, by the increased
-returns on the Socialist ticket at some local election!
-
-The permanent value of this book is that it proceeds out of a truly
-adequate and philosophical conception of democracy. That the collective
-human spirit should know itself, καταμαθεῖν τὴν φύσιν καὶ ταύτη
-ἕπεσθαι, that the state, the communal unit, should be, in Mr. Arnold’s
-phrase, “the expression of our best self, which is not manifold and
-vulgar and unstable and contentious and ever varying, but one and noble
-and secure and peaceful and the same for all mankind”; here we have
-in outline the operation of democracy. One could not give this volume
-higher praise than to say, as in justice one must say, that it clearly
-discerns and abundantly conveys the spirit which works in human nature
-toward this end.
-
-How important it is to maintain this fluid, philosophical and spiritual
-view of democracy may be seen when we look about us and consider
-the plight of those--especially the many now concerned in politics,
-whether professionally or as eager amateurs--who for lack of it confuse
-various aspects of the political problem of liberty with the social
-problem of equality. With political liberty or with self-expression
-of the individual in politics, democracy has, and ever has had, very
-little to do. It is our turbid thought about democracy that prevents
-our seeing this. The aristocratic and truculent barons did more for
-the political freedom of Englishmen than was ever done by democracy;
-a selfish and sensual king did more to gain the individual Englishman
-his freedom of self-expression in politics. In our own country it is
-matter of open and notorious fact that a political party whose every
-sentiment and tendency is aristocratic has been the one to bring about
-the largest measures of political enfranchisement. Now, surely, one
-may heartily welcome every enlargement of political liberty, but if
-one attributes them to a parentage which is not theirs, if one relates
-them under _democracy_, the penalty which nature inexorably imposes
-upon error is sure to follow. If, therefore, in the following pages
-the author seems occasionally lukewarm toward certain enfranchising
-measures, I do not understand that he disparages them, but only that
-he sees--as their advocates, firmly set in the confusion we speak
-of, cannot see--that their connection with democracy is extremely
-indistinct and remote. _Equality_--a social problem, not to be worked
-out by the mechanics of politics, but appealing wholly to the best
-self, the best reason and spirit of man,--this is democracy’s concern,
-democracy’s chief interest. It is to our author’s praise, again, that
-he sees this clearly and expresses it convincingly.
-
-By far the most admirable and impressive picture in this book appears
-to me to be that which the author has all unconsciously drawn of
-himself. It reveals once more that tragedy--the most profound, most
-common and most neglected of all the multitude of useless tragedies
-that our weak and wasteful civilization by sheer indifference
-permits--the tragedy of a richly gifted nature denied the opportunity
-of congenial self-expression. What by comparison is the tragedy of
-starvation, since so very many willingly starve, if haply they may find
-this opportunity? The author is an artist, a born artist. His natural
-place is in a world unknown and undreamed of by us children of an age
-commissioned to carry out the great idea of industrial and political
-development. He belongs by birthright in the eternal realm of divine
-impossibilities, of sublime and delightful inconsistencies. Greatly
-might he have fulfilled his destiny in music, in poetry, in painting
-had he been born at one of those periods when spiritual activity was
-all but universal, when spiritual ideas were popular and dominant,
-_volitantes per ora virum_, part of the very air one breathed--in the
-Greece of Pericles, the England of Elizabeth, or on the Tuscan hills
-at the time of the Florentine Renaissance! But this was not to be. An
-admirer, jealous of every possible qualification, reminds me that I
-should call him at least a philosophical artist; yes, but not by nature
-even that. The toga did not drop upon him readymade from a celestial
-loom. It was woven and fitted laboriously by his own hands. He sought
-philosophical consistency and found it and established himself in it;
-but only as part of the difficult general discipline of an alien life.
-
-What an iron discipline, and how thoroughly alien a life, stands
-revealed to the eye of poetic insight and the spirit of sympathetic
-delicacy, on every page of these memoirs. For the over-refined (as
-we say), the oversensitive soul of a born artist--think of the
-experience, think of the achievement! The very opposite of all that
-makes a politician, appraising politics always at their precise value,
-yet patiently spending all the formative years of his life in the
-debilitating air of politics for the sake of what he might indirectly
-accomplish. Not an executive, yet incessantly occupied with tedious
-details of administrative work, for the satisfaction of knowing them
-well done. Not a philosopher, yet laboriously making himself what
-Glanvil quaintly calls “one of those larger souls who have traveled the
-divers climates of opinion” until he acquired a social philosophy that
-should meet his own exacting demands.
-
-Is it too much, then, that I invite the reader’s forbearance with
-these paragraphs to show why our author should himself take rank and
-estimation with the great men whom he reverently pictures? He tells
-the story of Altgeld and of Johnson, energetic champions of the newer
-political freedom. He tells the story of Jones, the incomparable true
-democrat, one of the children of light and sons of the Resurrection,
-such as appear but once in an era. And in the telling of these men
-and of himself as the alien and, in his own view, largely accidental
-continuator of their work, it seems to me that he indicates the process
-by which he too has worked out his own position among them as “one
-of those consoling and hope-inspiring marks which stand forever to
-remind our weak and easily discouraged race how high human goodness and
-perseverance have once been carried and may be carried again.”
-
-                                                        ALBERT JAY NOCK.
-
-  THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE,
-    NEW YORK.
-
-
-
-
-FORTY YEARS OF IT
-
-
-
-
-FORTY YEARS OF IT
-
-
-
-
-I
-
-
-One hot afternoon in the summer of my tenth year, my grandfather,
-having finished the nap he was accustomed to take after the heavy
-dinner which, in those days, was served at noon in his house, told
-me that I might go up town with him. This was not only a relief, but
-a prospect of adventure. It was a relief to have him finish his nap,
-because while he was taking his nap, my grandmother drew down at all
-the windows the heavy green shades, which, brought home by the family
-after a residence in Nuremberg, were decorated at the bottom with a
-frieze depicting scenes along the Rhine, and a heavy and somnolent
-silence was imposed on all the house. When my grandfather took his nap,
-life seemed to pause, all activities were held in suspense.
-
-And the prospect was as a pleasant adventure, because whenever my
-grandfather let me go up town with him he always made me a present,
-which was sure to be more valuable, more expensive, than those little
-gifts at home, bestowed as rewards of various merits and sacrifices
-related to that institution of the afternoon nap, and forthcoming if he
-got through the nap satisfactorily, that is, without being awakened.
-They consisted of mere money, the little five or ten cent notes of
-green scrip; “shin-plasters” they were called, I believe, in those days.
-
-When my grandfather had rearranged his toilet, combing his thick white
-hair and then immediately running his fingers through it to rumple it
-up and give him a savage aspect, we set forth.
-
-He wore broad polished shoes, low, and fastened with buckles, and
-against the black of his attire his stiffly starched, immaculate white
-waistcoat was conspicuous. Only a few of its lower buttons of pearl
-were fastened; above that it was open, and from one of the buttonholes,
-the second from the top, his long gold watch-chain hung from its large
-gold hook. The black cravat was not hidden by his white beard, which
-he did not wear as long as many Ohio gentlemen of that day, and he was
-crowned by a large Panama hat, yellowed by years of summer service, and
-bisected by a ridge that began at the middle of the broad brim directly
-in front, ran back, climbed and surmounted the large high crown, and
-then, descending, ended its impressive career at the middle of the
-broad brim behind.
-
-I was walking on his left hand, near the fence, but as we entered the
-shade of the elms and shrubbery of the Swedenborgian churchyard, I went
-around to his other side, because a ghost dwelt in the Swedenborgian
-churchyard. My cousin had pointed it out to me, and once I had seen it
-distinctly.
-
-The precaution was unnecessary, for I had long known my grandfather for
-a brave man. He had been a soldier, and many persons in Urbana still
-saluted him as major, though at that time he was mayor; going up town,
-in fact, meant to go to the town hall before going anywhere else. In
-the shade he removed his hat, and taking out a large silk handkerchief,
-passed it several times over his red, perspiring face.
-
-It was, as I have said, a hot afternoon, even for an August afternoon
-in Ohio, and it was the hottest hour of the afternoon. Main Street,
-when we turned into it presently, was deserted, and wore an unreal
-appearance, like the street of the dead town that was painted on
-the scene at the “opera-house.” Far to the south it stretched its
-interminable length in white dust, until its trees came together in
-that mysterious distance where the fairgrounds were, and to the north
-its vista was closed by the bronze figure of the cavalryman standing
-on his pedestal in the Square, his head bowed in sad meditation, one
-gauntleted hand resting on his hip, the other on his saber-hilt. Out
-over the thick dust of the street the heat quivered and vibrated, and
-if you squinted in the sun at the cavalryman, he seemed to move, to
-tremble, in the shimmer of that choking atmosphere.
-
-The town hall stood in Market Square; for, in addition to _the_ Square,
-where the bronze cavalryman stood on his pedestal, there was Market
-Square, the day of civic centers not having dawned on Urbana in that
-time, nor, doubtless, in this.
-
-Market Square was not a square, however, but a parallelogram, and
-on one side of it, fronting Main Street, was the town hall, a low
-building of brick, representing in itself an amazing unity of municipal
-functions--the germ of the group plan, no doubt, and, after all, in
-its little way, a civic center indeed. For there, in an auditorium,
-plays were staged before a populace innocent of the fact that it had
-a municipal theater, and in another room the city council sat, with
-representatives from Lighttown, and Gooseville, and Guinea, and the
-other _faubourgs_ of our little municipality. Under that long low roof,
-too, were the “calaboose” and the headquarters of the fire department.
-Back of these the structure sloped away into a market-house of some
-sort, with a public scales, and broad, low, overhanging eaves, in the
-shade of which firemen, and the city marshal, and other officials, in
-the dim retrospect, seem to have devoted their leisure to the game of
-checkers.
-
-On the opposite side of Market Square there was a line of brick
-buildings, painted once, perhaps, and now of a faint pink or cerise
-which certain of the higher and more artistic grades of calcimining
-assume, and there seems to have been a series, almost interminable, of
-small saloons--declining and fading away somewhere to the east, in the
-dark purlieus of Guinea.
-
-Here, along this line of saloons, if it was a line of saloons, or, if
-it was not, along the side of the principal saloon which in those wet
-days commanded that corner, there were always several carts, driven
-by Irishmen from Lighttown, smoking short clay pipes, and two-wheeled
-drays driven by negroes from Guinea or Gooseville. These negro drivers
-were burly men with shining black skins and gleaming eyes and teeth,
-whose merry laughter was almost belied by the ferocious, brutal whips
-they carried--whips precisely like that _Simon Legree_ had wielded in
-the play in the theater just across the Square, now, by a stroke of
-poetic justice, in the hands of _Uncle Tom_ himself. But on this day
-the firemen were not to be seen under the eaves of the market-house;
-their checker-boards were quite abandoned. The mules between the
-shafts of these two-wheeled drays hung their heads and their long ears
-drooped under the heat, and their black masters were curled up on the
-sidewalk against the wall of the saloon, asleep. The Irishmen were
-nowhere to be seen, and Market Square was empty, deserted, and sprawled
-there reflecting the light in a blinding way, while from the yellow,
-dusty level of its cobbled surface rose, wave on wave, palpably, that
-trembling, shimmering, vibrating heat. And yet, there was one waking,
-living thing in sight. There, out in the middle of the Square he stood,
-a dusty, drab figure, with an old felt hat on a head that must have
-ached and throbbed in that implacable heat, with a mass of rags upon
-him, his frayed trousers gathered at his ankles and bound about by
-irons, and a ball and chain to bind him to that spot. He had a broom in
-his hands, and was aimlessly making a little smudge of dust, doing his
-part in the observance of an old, cruel, and hideous superstition.
-
-I knew, of course, that he was a prisoner. Usually there were three or
-four, sometimes half a dozen, such as he. They were the chain-gang,
-and they were Bad--made so by Rum. I knew that they were brought
-out of the calaboose, that damp, dark place under the roof of the
-market-house, somewhere between the office of the mayor and the
-headquarters of the fire department; and glimpses were to be caught now
-and then of their faces pressed against those bars.
-
-When, under the shade of the broad eaves, we were about to enter the
-mayor’s office, my grandfather motioned to the prisoner out there in
-the center of the Square, who with a new alacrity dropped his broom,
-picked up his ball, and lugging it in his arms, came up close to us,
-so very close that I could see the sweat that drenched his forehead,
-stood in great beads on his upper lip, matted the hair on his forearms,
-stained with dark splashes his old shirt, and glistened on his throat
-and breast, burned red by the sun. He dropped his ball, took off that
-rag of a hat, raised eyelids that were powdered with dust, and looked
-at my grandfather.
-
-“How many days did I give you?” my grandfather asked him.
-
-“Fifteen, your honor,” he said.
-
-“How long have you been in?”
-
-“Three days, your honor.”
-
-“Are you the only one in there?”
-
-“Yes, your honor.”
-
-My grandfather paused and looked at him.
-
-“Pretty hot out there, isn’t it?” asked my grandfather.
-
-The prisoner smiled, a smile exactly like that anyone would have for
-such a question, but the smile flickered from his face, as he said:
-
-“Yes, your honor.”
-
-My grandfather looked out over the Square and up and down. There was no
-one anywhere to be seen.
-
-“Well, come on into the office.”
-
-The prisoner picked up his ball, and followed my grandfather into the
-mayor’s office. My grandfather went to a desk, drew out a drawer,
-fumbled in it, found a key, and with this he stooped and unlocked the
-irons on the prisoner’s ankles. But he did not remove the irons--he
-seated himself in the large chair, and leaned comfortably against its
-squeaking cane back.
-
-“Now,” my grandfather said, “you go out there in the Square--be careful
-not to knock the leg irons off as you go,--and you sweep around for a
-little while, and when the coast is clear you kick them off and light
-out.”
-
-The creature in the drab rags looked at my grandfather a moment, opened
-his lips, closed them, swallowed, and then....
-
-“You’d better hurry,” said my grandfather, “I don’t know what minute
-the marshal----”
-
-The prisoner gathered up his ball, hugged it carefully, almost
-tenderly, in his arms, and, with infinity delicacy as to the irons on
-his feet, he shuffled carefully, yet somehow swiftly out. I saw him an
-instant in the brilliant glittering sunlight framed by the door; he
-looked back, and then he disappeared, leaving only the blank surface
-of the cobblestones with the heat trembling over them.
-
-My grandfather put on his glasses, turned to his desk, and took up some
-papers there. And I waited, in the still, hot room. The minutes were
-ticked off by the clock. I wondered at each loud tick if it was the
-minute in which it would be proper for the prisoner to kick off those
-irons from his ankles and start to run. And then, after a few minutes,
-a man appeared in the doorway, and said breathlessly:
-
-“Joe, he has escaped!”
-
-It was Uncle John, a brother of my grandfather, one of the Brands of
-Kentucky, then on a visit--one of those long visits by which he and my
-grandfather sought to make up the large arrears of the differences, the
-divisions, and the separations of the great war. He was nearly of my
-grandfather’s age, and like him a large man, with a white though longer
-beard. At his entrance my grandfather did not turn, nor speak, and
-Uncle John Brand cried again:
-
-“Joe, he’s gone, I tell you; he’s getting away!”
-
-My grandfather looked up then from his papers and said:
-
-“John, you’d better come in out of that heat and sit down. You’re
-excited.”
-
-“But he’s getting away, I tell you! Don’t you understand?”
-
-“Who is getting away?”
-
-“Why, that prisoner.”
-
-“What prisoner?”
-
-“The prisoner out there in the Square. He has escaped! He’s gone!”
-
-“But how do you know?”
-
-“I just saw him running down Main Street like a streak of lightning.”
-
-My grandfather took out his silk handkerchief, passed it over his brow,
-and said:
-
-“To think of anyone running on a day like this!”
-
-And Uncle John Brand stood there and gazed at his brother with an
-expression of despair.
-
-“Can’t you understand,” he said, speaking in an intense tone, as if
-somehow to impress my grandfather with the importance of this event
-in society, “can’t you understand that the prisoner out there in the
-Square has broken away, has escaped, and at this minute is running down
-Main Street, and that he’s getting farther and farther away with each
-moment that you sit there?”
-
-I had a vivid picture of the man running with long strides, in the soft
-dust of Main Street; he must even then, I fancied, be far down the
-street; he must indeed be down by Bailey’s, and perhaps Bailey’s dog
-was rushing out at him, barking. And I hoped he would run faster, and
-faster, and get away, though I felt it was wrong to hope this. Uncle
-John Brand seemed to be right; though I did not like him as I liked my
-grandfather.
-
-“But how could he get away?” my grandfather was asking. “He was in
-irons.”
-
-“He got the irons off somehow,” Uncle John Brand said, exasperated; “I
-don’t know how. He didn’t stop to explain!” He found a relief in this
-fine sarcasm, and then said:
-
-“Aren’t you going to do anything?”
-
-“Well,” said my grandfather, with an irresolution quite uncommon in
-him, “I suppose I really ought to do something. But I don’t know just
-what to do.” He sat up, and looked about all over the room. “You don’t
-see the marshal, do you?”
-
-Uncle John Brand was looking at him now in disgust.
-
-“Just look outside there, will you, John,” my grandfather went on, “and
-see if you can find him? If you do, send him in, and I’ll speak to him
-and have him go after the prisoner.”
-
-Uncle John Brand of Kentucky stood a moment in the doorway, finding no
-words with which to express himself, and then went out. And when he had
-gone my grandfather leaned back in his chair and laughed and laughed;
-laughed until his ruddy face became much redder than it was even from
-the heat of that day.
-
-
-
-
-II
-
-
-Now that I have set down, with such particularity, an incident which I
-could not wholly understand nor reconcile with the established order
-of things until many years after, I am not so sure after all that I
-witnessed it in that Urbana of reality; it may have been in that Urbana
-of the memory, wherein related scenes and incidents have coalesced with
-the witnessed event, or in that Macochee of certain of my attempts in
-fiction, though I have always hoped that the fiction was the essential
-reality of life, and have tried to make it so.
-
-I am certain, however, that the incident as related is entirely
-authentic, for I have recently made inquiries and established it
-beyond a reasonable doubt, as the lawyers say, in all its details as
-here given. I say in all its details, save possibly as to that of
-my own corporeal presence on the scene, at the actual moment of the
-occurrence. Only the other day I asked a favorite aunt of mine, and
-she remembered the incident perfectly, and many another similar to it.
-“It was just like him,” she added, with a dubious, though tolerant
-fondness. But when, like the insistent, questioning child in one of
-Riley’s Hoosier poems, I asked her if I had been there, she said she
-could not remember.
-
-But whether I was there in the flesh or not, or whether the whole
-reality of that scene, so poignant, and insistent, and indelible,
-with its denial of the grounds of authority, its challenge to the
-bases of society, its shock to the orthodox mind (like that of John
-Brand of Kentucky, a strict constructionist, who believed in the old
-Constitution, and even then, in slavery), remains in my memory as the
-result of one of those tricks of a mind that has always dramatized
-scenes for its own amusement, I was there in spirit, and, indeed, at
-many another scene in the life of Joseph Carter Brand, whose name
-my mother gave me as a good heritage. Whatever the bald and banal
-physical fact may have been, I was either present at the actual or in
-imagination at the described scene to such purpose that from it I
-derived an impression never to be erased from my mind.
-
-It is not given to all of us to say with such particularity and
-emphasis, just what we learned from each person who has touched our
-existences and affected the trend of our lives, as it was given to
-Marcus Aurelius, for instance, so that one may say that from Rusticus
-one received this impression, or that from Apollonius one learned this
-and from Alexander the Platonic that; we must rather ascribe our little
-store of knowledge generally to the gods. But I am sure that no one was
-ever long with Joseph Carter Brand, or came to know him well, without
-learning that rarest and most beautiful of all the graces or of all the
-virtues--Pity.
-
-  He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble
-  Here, and in hell.
-
-Perhaps it is not so much pity as sympathy that I mean, but whether it
-was pity or sympathy, it was that divine quality in man which enables
-him to imagine the sorrows of others, to understand what they feel, to
-suffer with them; in a word, the ability to put himself in the other
-fellow’s place--the hallmark, I believe, of true culture, far more than
-any degree or doctor’s hood could possibly be.
-
-It may have been some such feeling as this for the negroes that led
-him, when a young man in Kentucky, to renounce a patrimony of slaves
-and come north. It was not, to be sure, a very large patrimony, for
-his father was a farmer in a rather small way in Bourbon County, and
-owned a few slaves, but whatever the motive, he refused to own human
-chattels and left Bourbon County, where his branch of the Brands had
-lived since their emigration from Virginia, to which colony, so long
-before, their original had come as a Jacobite exile from Forfarshire in
-Scotland.
-
-My grandfather came north into Ohio and Champaign County, and he had
-not been there very long before he went back to Virginia and married
-Lavina Talbott, and when they went to live on the farm he called
-“Pretty Prairie,” he soon found himself deep in Ohio politics, as it
-seems the fate of most Ohioans to be, and continued in that element
-all his life. He had his political principles from Henry Clay,--he had
-been to Ashland and had known the family,--and he was elected as a Whig
-to the legislature in 1842 and to the State Senate of Ohio in 1854.
-There he learned to know and to admire Salmon P. Chase, then governor
-of Ohio, and it was not long until he was in the Abolitionist movement,
-and he got into it so deeply that nothing less than the Civil War could
-ever have got him out, for he was in open defiance, most of the time,
-to the Fugitive Slave Law.
-
-One of the accomplishments in which he took pride, perhaps next to
-his ability as a horseman, was his skill with the rifle, acquired in
-Kentucky at the expense of squirrels in the tops of tall trees (he
-could snuff a candle with a rifle), and this ability he placed at the
-service of a negro named Ad White, who had run away from his master
-in the South, and was hidden in a corn-crib near Urbana when overtaken
-by United States marshals from Cincinnati. The negro was armed, and
-was defending himself, when my grandfather and his friend Ichabod
-Corwin, of a name tolerably well known in Ohio history, went to his
-assistance, and drove the marshals off by the hot fire of their rifles.
-The marshals retreated, and came up later with reinforcements, strong
-enough to overpower Judge Corwin and my grandfather, but the negro had
-escaped.
-
-The scrape was an expensive one; there were proceedings against them
-in the United States court in Cincinnati, and they only got out of it
-years after when the Fugitive Slave Law was rapidly becoming no law,
-and Ad White could live near Urbana in peace during a long life, and be
-pointed out as an interesting relic of the great conflict.
-
-This adventure befell my grandfather in 1858, when he had been
-a Republican for two years, having been a delegate to the first
-convention of the party in 1856, the one that met in Pittsburgh, before
-the nominating convention which named Frémont had met in Philadelphia.
-He had attended that convention with Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky, and
-shared quarters with him at the hotel.
-
-In 1908, in the Coliseum at Chicago, when the Republican National
-Convention was in session, there were conducted to the stage one
-morning, and introduced to the delegates, two old gentlemen who had
-been delegates to that first convention of the party, and after they
-had been presented and duly celebrated by the chairman and cheered
-by the delegates they were assiduously given seats in large chairs,
-and there, throughout the session, side by side they sat, their hands
-clasped over the crooks of their heavy canes, their white old heads
-unsteady, peering out in a certain purblind, bewildered, aged way over
-that mighty assembly of the power and the wealth, the respectability
-and the authority, of the nation--far other than that revolutionary
-gathering they had attended half a century before!
-
-All through the session, now and then, I would look at them; there was
-a certain indefinable pathos in them, they sat so still, they were
-so old, there was in their attitude the acquiescence of age--and I
-would recall my grandfather’s stories of the days when they were the
-force in the Republic, and the runaway “niggers,” and the rifles, and
-the great blazing up of liberty in the land, and it seemed to me that
-Time, or what Thomas Hardy calls the Ironic Spirit, or perhaps it was
-only the politicians who were managing the convention, had played some
-grotesque, stupendous joke on those patriarchs. Did their old eyes,
-gazing so strangely on that scene, behold its implications? Did they
-descry the guide-post that told them how far away they really were from
-that first convention and its ideals?
-
-But whatever the reflections of those two aboriginal Republicans, or
-whatever emotions or speculations they may have inspired in those who
-saw them,--the torch of liberty being ever brandished somewhere in
-this world and tossed from hand to hand,--they had done their part in
-their day, and might presumably be allowed to look on at the antics
-of men wherever they chose, in peace. They had known Lincoln, no
-inconsiderable distinction in itself!
-
-Out of that first convention my grandfather, like them, had gone, and
-he had done his part to help elect Lincoln after Lincoln had defeated
-Chase in the Chicago convention of 1860, and had been nominated for the
-presidency. And then, with his man elected, my grandfather had gone
-into the war that broke upon the land.
-
-He went in with the 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a regiment which he
-was commissioned by Governor Dennison to recruit at Urbana, and when
-it was marshaled in camp near Urbana its command was offered him,
-an honor and a responsibility he declined because, he said, he knew
-nothing of the art of war, if it is an art, or of its science, if it is
-a science, and so was content with the shoulder-straps of a captain.
-One of his sons, a lieutenant in the regular army, was already at the
-front with his regiment, and another son was a captain in the 66th, and
-later on, when my grandfather had been transferred to the Department
-of Subsistence, he took his youngest son with him in the capacity of
-a clerk, so that the men of his family were away to the war for those
-four years, and the women remained behind, making housewives and
-scraping lint, and watching, and waiting, and praying, and enduring all
-those hardships and making all those sacrifices which are so lauded by
-the poetic and the sentimental and yet are not enough to entitle them
-to a voice in that government in whose cause they are made.
-
-The situation was made all the more poignant because the great issue
-had separated the family, and there were brothers and cousins on the
-other side, though one of these, in the person of Aunt Lucretia,
-chose that inauspicious time to come over from the other side all the
-way from Virginia, to pay a visit, and celebrated the report of a
-Confederate victory by parading up town with a butternut badge on her
-bosom. She sailed several times about the Square, with her head held
-high and her crinolines rustling and standing out, and her butternut
-badge in evidence, and was rescued by my grandmother, who, hearing
-of her temerity, went up town in desperation and in fear that she
-might arrive too late. It was a story I was fond of hearing, and as I
-pictured the lively scene I always had the statue of the cavalryman as
-a figure in the picture--though of course the statue could not have
-been in existence during the war, since it was erected as a memorial
-to the 66th and a monument to its fallen heroes and their deeds. The
-cavalryman, an officer wearing a romantic cloak and the old plumed hat
-of the military fashion of that date, and leaning on his saber in a
-gloomy way, I always thought was a figure of my uncle, that Captain
-Brand who went out with the 66th, just as I thought for a long time
-that the Civil War was practically fought out on the northern side
-by the 66th, which was not so strange perhaps, since nearly every
-family in Urbana had been represented in the regiment, and they all
-talked of little else than the war for many years. They called the
-66th the “Bloody Sixty-sixth,” a name I have since heard applied to
-other regiments, but the honorable epithet was not undeserved by that
-legion, for it had a long and most gallant record, beginning with the
-Army of the Potomac and fighting in all that army’s battles until after
-Gettysburg, and then with the 11th and 12th corps it was transferred,
-under Hooker, to the Army of the Tennessee, at Chattanooga, in time for
-Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, after which it went with Sherman
-to the sea, and thus completed the circuit of the Confederacy.
-
-
-
-
-III
-
-
-My grandfather, however, did not go with his regiment to the West. He
-had been transferred to the Commissary Department, and he remained with
-the Army of the Potomac until the close of the war, and it was on some
-detail connected with his duties in that department that, in 1865, he
-went into Washington and had the interview with President Lincoln I
-so much liked to hear him tell about. It was not in the course of his
-military duty that he went to see the Commander-in-Chief; whatever
-those duties were they were quickly discharged at the War Department,
-so that, in the hours of freedom remaining to him before he went back
-to the front, he did what everyone likes to do in Washington,--he
-went to see the President. But he went in no military capacity; he
-went rather in that political capacity he so much preferred to the
-military, and he went as to the chief he had so long known and loved
-and followed.
-
-It would be his old friend Chase who presented him to the President,
-but their conversation was soon interrupted by the entrance of an aide
-who announced the arrival in the White House grounds of an Indiana
-regiment passing through Washington, which, as seems to have been the
-case with most regiments passing through the Capital, demanded a speech
-from the President. And Lincoln complied, and as he arose to go out he
-asked my grandfather to accompany him, and they continued their talk
-on the way. But when they stood in the White House portico, and the
-regiment beheld the President and saluted him with its lifted cheer,
-the aide stepped to my grandfather’s side, and much to his chagrin--for
-he had been held by the President while he finished a story--told him
-that it would be necessary for him to drop a few paces to the rear.
-It was a little _contretemps_ that embarrassed my grandfather, but
-Lincoln, with his fine and delicate perceptions, divined the whole
-situation, and met it with that kindness which was so great a part of
-the humor and humanness in him, by saying:
-
-“You see, Mr. Brand, they might not know which was the President.”
-
-It was not long after that he was at Appomattox and the first to issue
-rations to the hungry Confederates who had just surrendered, and no
-act of his life gave him quite as much satisfaction as to have been
-the first to pour his whole supply of hardtack into the blankets of
-those whom still and always he remembered as of his own blood. And that
-done, after they had ridden into Richmond, he was relieved and was
-soon back in Washington calling on Chase again. Chase asked him what
-he could do for him, and my grandfather said there was but one thing
-in the world he wanted: namely, to go home; and a request so simple
-was granted with that alacrity with which politicians grant requests
-that, in their scope, fall so short of what might have been expected.
-But it was not long until Chase’s influence was requested in a more
-substantial matter, and in 1870 my grandfather, with his wife and two
-younger daughters, was on his way across the Atlantic to Nuremberg,
-where President Grant had appointed him consul.
-
-It was not, of course, until after his return from the foreign
-experience that my conscious acquaintance with him began. But when they
-returned and opened the old house, and filled it with the spoil of
-their European travel,--some wonderful mahogany furniture and Dresden
-china, and other objects of far more delight to us children,--he and
-I began a friendship which lasted until his death, and was marred by
-no misunderstanding, except, perhaps, as to the number of hours his
-saddle-horse should be ridden on the gallop, and the German he wished
-me to read to him out of the little black-bound volumes of Schiller and
-Goethe, which for years were his companions. He held, no doubt with
-some show of reason on his side, that if he could master the language
-after he was sixty, I might learn at least to read it before I was
-sixteen. The task had its discouragements, not lightened, even in
-after years, when I read in their famous and delightful correspondence
-Carlyle’s advice to Emerson to possess himself of the German language;
-it could be done, wrote Carlyle, in six weeks! But, like Emerson, I was
-afflicted with the postponement and debility of the blond constitution,
-and I observed that, except in great moments of unappreciated
-sacrifice, my grandfather preferred to read his German himself rather
-than to listen to my renditions.
-
-I have spoken of the house as the old house, and I do that as viewing
-it from the point of disadvantage of the years that have gone since it
-grew out of that haze and mist and darkness of early recollections into
-a place that was ablaze with light at evening and full of the constant
-wonder and delight of the company of a large family. It was, indeed,
-an old house then, with a high-gabled roof at one wing, that made an
-attic which we called, with a sense of its mystery, the “dark room,”--a
-room, however, not so dark that I could not see to read the old bound
-volumes of a newspaper an uncle had once edited;--one could lie under
-the little gable windows and pore over the immense quartos, or more
-than quartos, and exercise the imagination by reading of some long dead
-event, and, with a great effort, project one’s self back to that time,
-and pretend to read with none other than its contemporary impressions.
-
-The cellar of the house was not so interesting, though it was
-mysterious, and far more terrifying. There was a vast fireplace in the
-cellar, in which, as Jane, the old colored woman who was sometimes a
-cook and sometimes a nurse, once solemnly told my cousin and me, the
-devil dwelt, so that I visited it only once, and there so plainly saw
-the ugly horns of that dark deity that we fled upstairs and into the
-sunlight again. It may have been that the crane and the andirons of
-the old fireplace helped out the impression, though after the original
-suggestion little was required to strengthen it, and we never went down
-there again, except to lure a younger cousin as far as the door to
-shudder in the awful pleasure of witnessing her fear.
-
-This gabled wing had been the original house, and additions had been
-built to it in two directions, with a wide hall, somewhat after the
-southern fashion in which so many houses in that part of Ohio were
-built in those days.
-
-It seems larger in the retrospect than it is in the reality, and I am
-not endowing it with the spaciousness of a mansion; it was, in fact, a
-modest dwelling of a dozen rooms, with an atmosphere that was imparted
-to it by the furniture that had been brought back from Europe, and the
-personality that filled it.
-
-My grandfather conducted his establishment on a scale of prodigality
-that had a certain patriarchal air; he had a large family, and he loved
-to have them all about him, and in the evenings they gathered there
-at the piano they had bought in Berlin, and when the candles in their
-curious brass sconces had been lighted, there was music, for the whole
-family possessed some of that talent which, as President Eliot rightly
-declares in his lecture on “The Happy Life,” contributes so much real
-pleasure. My grandfather did not himself sing; or, at least, he sang
-rarely, and then only one or two Scotch songs, but when he could be
-induced to do this, the event took on the festal air of a celebration.
-
-His two younger daughters had been educated in music in Germany, and
-there was something more of music in the house than the mere classic
-portraits of Mozart and Beethoven which hung on the wall near the
-painting of the old castle at Nuremberg. They played duets, and once,
-at least, at a recital given in the town, we achieved the distinction
-of a number played on two pianos by my mother and her three sisters.
-
-The May festivals in “the City,” as we called Cincinnati in those days,
-were a part of existence, and my first excursion into the larger world
-was when my father took me to Cincinnati to hear Theodore Thomas’s
-Orchestra, which proved to be an excursion not only into a larger
-world, but eventually into a larger life,--that life of music, that
-life of a love of all the arts, which provides a consolation that would
-be complete could I but express myself in any one of them. I did,
-indeed, attempt some expression of the joys of that experience, for
-with more pretension than I could dare to-day, I wrote a composition,
-or paper, on Music which was printed in a child’s publication, and won
-for me a little prize. It was twenty-two years before I was able again
-to have any writing of mine accepted and published by a magazine.
-
-
-
-
-IV
-
-
-Urbana in those days was not without its atmosphere of culture,
-influenced in a degree by the presence of the Urbana University, a
-Swedenborgian college which in the days before the war had flourished,
-because so many of its students came from the southern states. It
-declined after the war, but even after that event, the presence of so
-many persons of the Swedenborgian persuasion, with their gentle manners
-and intellectual appreciation, kept the traditions alive, and the
-college itself continued, though not so flourishingly, on its endowed
-foundation.
-
-One of the tutors in it was a young, brown-haired man who several
-times a day passed by my grandfather’s home on his way to and from his
-classes, whom afterwards I came to admire for those writings to which
-was signed the name of Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen. He did not remain long
-in Urbana, not longer it seems than he could help, and to judge from
-some of his pictures of various phases of its life, he did not like the
-town as well as the Urbana folk themselves liked it. It was a rather
-self-sufficient town, I fancy, and it cared so little for change that
-it has scarcely changed at all, save as one misses the faces and the
-forms one used to see there in other days. It was the home of the
-distinguished family, and the birthplace, too, of John Quincy Adams
-Ward, the sculptor, and the possession of a personality in itself
-distinguishes a town.
-
-I was walking with my father across Market Square not long ago; it
-had shrunk in size and seemed little and mean and sordid, despite the
-new city hall that has replaced the old, and there was no miserable
-prisoner idly sweeping the cobblestones, though the negro drivers with
-their bull whips were snoozing there as formerly.
-
-“They have been there ever since eighteen sixty-six,” said my father,
-who had gone there in the year he had mentioned on his coming out of
-college.
-
-His home was in Piqua, a town not far away, where his father had
-retired to rest after his lifelong labors on a farm he had himself
-“cleared” in Montgomery County many years before. This paternal
-grandfather was a large, gaunt, silent man, who spoke little, and then
-mostly in a sardonic humor, as when, during that awful pioneer work of
-felling a forest to make a little plantation, he said to his grown sons
-who were helping to clear away the underbrush of a walnut wood:
-
-“Boys, what little you cut, pile here.”
-
-Few other of his sayings have been preserved, and it may be that he
-has left behind an impression that he never talked at all because
-he never talked politics, and not to do that in Ohio dooms one to
-a silence almost perpetual. He had once been a Democrat, and had
-participated with such enthusiasm in the campaign of 1856 that he had
-kept his horses’ tails and manes braided for a month that they might
-roll forth in noble curls when they were loosened, and the horses
-harnessed to a carriage containing four veterans of the Revolution,
-who were to be thus splendidly drawn to the raising of a tall hickory
-pole in honor of James Buchanan, that year a candidate for president.
-But the old diplomatist made such a miserable weakling failure of his
-administration that his Piqua partizan became disgusted and renounced
-forever his interest in political affairs, and, like Henry I., never
-smiled again.
-
-But my Grandfather Brand, when he was not talking about poetry or
-the war, was talking about politics; sometimes world politics, for
-he was interested in that; sometimes European politics, which he had
-followed ever since in Paris he had witnessed the outbreak of the
-Franco-Prussian War, or national politics, or state politics, or, in
-default of a larger interest, local politics, which in Ohio, as no
-doubt elsewhere, sometimes looms largest and most important of all,
-because, perhaps, as De Tocqueville says, local assemblies constitute
-the strength of free institutions.
-
-My grandfather was then, at the time of which I am thinking even if
-I am not very specifically writing about it, mayor--and continued
-to be mayor for four terms. It was an office that was suited, no
-doubt, to the leisure of his retirement, and while it gave him the
-feeling of being occupied in public affairs, it nevertheless left him
-opportunities enough for his German poets, and for his horses and his
-farm out at Cable, and the strawberries he was beginning to cultivate
-with the enthusiasm of an amateur.
-
-In such an atmosphere as that in the Ohio of those days it was natural
-to be a Republican; it was more than that, it was inevitable that one
-should be a Republican; it was not a matter of intellectual choice, it
-was a process of biological selection. The Republican party was not
-a faction, not a group, not a wing, it was an institution like those
-Emerson speaks of in his essay on Politics, rooted like oak-trees in
-the center around which men group themselves as best they can. It was
-a fundamental and self-evident thing, like life, and liberty, and the
-pursuit of happiness, or like the flag, or the federal judiciary. It
-was elemental, like gravity, the sun, the stars, the ocean. It was
-merely a synonym for patriotism, another name for the nation. One
-became, in Urbana and in Ohio for many years, a Republican just as the
-Eskimo dons fur clothes. It was inconceivable that any self-respecting
-person should be a Democrat. There were, perhaps, Democrats in
-Lighttown; but then there were rebels in Alabama, and in the Ku-klux
-Klan, about which we read in the evening, in the Cincinnati _Gazette_.
-
-One of the perplexing and confounding anomalies of existence was the
-fact that our neighbor, Mr. L----, was a Democrat. That fact perhaps
-explained to me why he walked so modestly, so unobtrusively, in the
-shade, so close to the picket fences of Reynolds Street, with his head
-bowed. I supposed that, being a Democrat, it was only natural for him
-to slink along. He was a lawyer and a gentleman; my grandfather spoke
-with him, but from my mind I could never banish the fact that he was
-a Democrat, and to explain his bent, thoughtful attitude I imagined
-another reason than the fact that he was a meditative, studious man.
-
-Lawyers, of course, were Republicans, else how could they deliver
-patriotic addresses on Decoration Day and at the reunions of the 66th
-regiment? It was natural for a young man to be a lawyer, then to be
-elected prosecuting attorney, then to go to the legislature, then
-to congress, then--governor, senator, president. They could not, of
-course, go any more to war and fight for liberty; that distinction was
-no longer, unhappily, possible, but they could be Republicans. The
-Republican party had saved the Union, won liberty for all men, and
-there was nothing left for the patriotic to do but to extol that party,
-and to see to it that its members held office under the government.
-
-In those days the party had many leaders in Ohio who had served the
-nation in military or civil capacity during the great crisis; scarcely
-a county that had not some colonel or general whose personality
-impressed the popular imagination; they were looked up to, and revered,
-and in the political campaigns their faces, pale or red in the flare
-of the torches of those vast and tumultuous processions that still
-staged the political contest in the terms of war, looked down from the
-festooned platforms in every public square. And yet they were already
-remote, statuesque, oracular, and there was the reverent sense that
-somehow placed them in the ideal past, whose problems had all been
-happily solved, rather than in the real present.
-
-
-
-
-V
-
-
-But up in the northwestern part of the state, still referred to, even
-in days so late as those, with something of the humorous contempt that
-attached to the term, as the Black Swamp, there had risen a young,
-fiery, and romantic figure who ignored the past and flung himself with
-fierce ardor into a new campaign for liberty. His words fell strangely
-on ears that were accustomed to the reassurance that liberty was at
-last conquered, and his doctrines perplexed and irritated minds that
-had sunk into the shallow optimism of a belief that there were no more
-liberations needed in the world. It was not a new cry, indeed, that he
-raised, but an old one thought to have been stilled, and the standard
-he lifted in the Black Swamp was looked upon by many Ohioans as much
-askance as though it were another secession flag of stars and bars.
-Indeed, it had long been associated with the cause of the conquered
-South, because that section, by reason of its economic conditions, had
-long espoused the principle of Free Trade.
-
-This young man was Frank Hunt Hurd, then the congressman from the
-Toledo district, and in that city, where my father was the pastor of a
-church, he had won many followers and adherents, though not enough to
-keep him continually in his seat in the House of Representatives.
-
-He served for several alternate terms, the interims being filled by
-some orthodox nonentity, who was so speedily forgotten that there must
-have been an impression that for years our district was represented by
-this one man.
-
-I had heard of him with that dim sense of his position which a boy has
-of any public character, but I had a real vivid conception of him after
-that Fourth of July when, during a citizens’ celebration which must
-have been so far patriotic as to forget, for a time, partizanism, and
-to remember patriotism sufficiently to include the Democrats, I saw him
-conducted to the platform by our distinguished citizen, David R. Locke,
-whom the world knew as “Petroleum V. Nasby.”
-
-He delivered a patriotic oration, and anyone,--even though he were
-but a wondering boy quite by chance in attendance, standing on the
-outskirts of the crowd, following some whim which for a while kept him
-from his sports,--anyone who ever heard Frank Hurd deliver an oration
-never forgot it afterward.
-
-I have no idea now what it was he said, perhaps I had as little then,
-but his black hair, his handsome face, his beautiful voice, and the
-majestic music of his rolling phrases were wholly and completely
-charming. He was explicitly an orator, a student of the great art,
-and he formed his orations on the ancient Greek models, writing them
-out with exordium, proposition, and peroration, and while he did not
-perhaps exactly commit them to memory, he, nevertheless, in the process
-of preparing them, so completely possessed himself of them that he
-poured forth his polished sentences without a flaw.
-
-His speech on Free Trade, delivered in the House of Representatives,
-February 18, 1881, remains the classic on that subject, ranking with
-Henry Clay’s speech on “The American System,” delivered in the Senate
-in 1832. In that address Frank Hurd began with the phrase, “The tariff
-is a tax,” which acquired much currency years after when Grover
-Cleveland used it.
-
-Everyone, or nearly everyone, told me of course that Frank Hurd was
-wrong, if he was not, indeed, wicked, and the subject possessed a kind
-of fascination for me. In thinking of it, or in trying to think of
-it, I only perplexed myself more deeply, until at last I reached the
-formidable, the momentous decision of taking my perplexities to Frank
-Hurd himself, and of laying them before him.
-
-I was by this time a youth of eighteen, and in the summer when he had
-come home from Washington I somehow found courage enough to go to the
-hotel where he lived, and to inquire for him. He was there in the
-lobby, standing by the cigar-stand, talking to some men, and I hung on
-the outskirts of the little group until it broke up, and then the fear
-I had felt vanished when he turned and smiled upon me. I told him that
-I wished to know about Free Trade, and since there was nothing he liked
-better to talk about, and too, since there were few who could talk
-better about anything than he could talk about the tariff, we sat in
-the big leather chairs while he discoursed simply on the subject. It
-was the first at several of these conversations, or lessons, which we
-had in the big leather chairs in the lobby of the old Boody House, and
-it was not long until I was able, with a solemn pride, to announce at
-home that I was a Free-Trader and a Democrat.
-
-It could hardly have been worse had I announced that I had been
-visiting Ingersoll, and was an atheist. Cleveland was president, and in
-time he sent his famous tariff reform message to Congress, and though I
-could not vote, I was preparing to give him my moral support, to wear
-his badge, and even, if I could do no more, to refuse to march in the
-Republican processions with the club of young men and boys organized in
-our neighborhood.
-
-For the first time in my life I went on my vacation trip to Urbana
-that summer with reluctance, for the first time in my life I shrank
-from seeing my grandfather. The wide front door opened, and from the
-heat without to the dark and cool interior of the hall I stepped; I
-prolonged the preliminaries, I went through the familiar apartments,
-and out into the garden to see how it grew that summer, and down to
-the stable to see the horses; but the inevitable hour drew on, and at
-last, with all the trivial things said, all the personal questions
-asked, we sat in the living-room, cool in the half-light produced
-by its drawn shades, the soft air of summer blowing through it, the
-odd old Nuremberg furniture, the painting of the Nuremberg castle
-presented to my grandfather by the American artist whom he had rescued
-from a scrape, the tall pier glass, with the little vase of flowers
-on its marble base, and my grandfather in his large chair, his white
-waistcoat half unbuttoned and one side sagging with the weight of
-the heavy watch-chain that descended from its large hook, his white
-beard trimmed a little more closely, his white hair bristling as
-aggressively as ever--all the same, all as of old, like the reminders
-of the old life and all its traditions now to be broken and rendered
-forever and tragically different from all it had been and meant. He
-sat there looking at me, the blue eyes twinkling under their shaggy
-brows, and stretched forth his long white hand in the odd gesture with
-which he began his conversations. Conversations with him, it suddenly
-developed, were not easy to sustain; he pursued the Socratic method. If
-you disagreed with him, he lifted three fingers toward you, whether in
-menace or in benediction it was difficult at times to determine, and
-said:
-
-“Let me instruct you.”
-
-For instance:
-
-“Do you know why Napoleon III. lost the battle of Sedan?” he might
-abruptly inquire.
-
-“No, sir,” you were expected to say. (You always addressed him as
-“sir.”)
-
-“Let me instruct you.”
-
-Or:
-
-“Do you know who was the greatest English poet?”
-
-“No, sir,” you would say, or, perhaps, in those days you might
-venture, “Was it Shakespeare, sir?”
-
-Then he would look at you and say:
-
-“Let me instruct you.”
-
-This afternoon then, after I had inspected the premises, noticed how
-much taller my cousin’s fir-tree was than the one I called mine (we
-had planted them one day, as little boys, years before), and after I
-had had a drink at the old pump, which in those days, before germs,
-brought up such cold, clear water, and after I had ascended to my cool
-room upstairs, and come downstairs again, and we had idly talked for
-a little while, as I said, he sat and looked at me a moment, and then
-said:
-
-“Do you understand this tariff question?”
-
-In those days I might have made the due, what I might term with
-reference to that situation, the conventional reply, and so have said:
-
-“No, sir.”
-
-In these days I am sure I should. But I hesitated. He had already
-stretched forth his hand.
-
-“Yes, sir,” I said.
-
-He drew in his hand, and for an instant touched with his long fingers
-the end of his large nose. I plunged ahead.
-
-“I am in favor of Free Trade, sir.”
-
-He did not extend his hand. He looked at me a moment, and then he said:
-
-“You are quite right; we must support Mr. Cleveland in the coming
-contest.”
-
-And then he sank back in his chair and laughed.
-
-He was always like that, following the truth as he saw it, wherever
-it led him. But his active days were not many after that; ere long he
-was kicked by one of his horses, a vicious animal, half bronco, which
-he insisted on riding, and he was invalided for the rest of his days.
-He spent them in a wheel-chair, pushed about by a negro boy. It was a
-cross he bore bravely enough, without complaint, spending his hours
-in reading of politics, now that he could no longer participate in
-them, and more and more in reading verse, and even in committing it
-to memory, so that to the surprise of his family he soon replaced the
-grace he had always said at table with some recited stanza of poetry,
-and he took to cultivating, or to sitting in his chair while there was
-cultivated, under his direction, a little rose garden. He knew all
-those roses as though they were living persons: when a lady called,--if
-the roses were in bloom,--he would say to his colored house-boy:
-
-“Go cut off Madame Maintenon, and bring her here.”
-
-Then he would present Madame Maintenon to the caller with such a bow
-as he could make in his chair, and an apology for not rising. He was
-patient and brave, yet he did not like to feel the scepter passing
-from him, and he resented what he considered interferences with his
-liberties. One day when he had returned from a visit to an old friend,
-to whose home his colored boy had wheeled him, one of his daughters
-asked, in a somewhat exaggerated tone of propitiation:
-
-“Well, Father, how did you find Mr. Hovey?”
-
-“I found him master of his own house!” he blazed.
-
-In 1896 he supported Mr. Bryan, and his Republican neighbors said:
-
-“Poor old Major Brand! His mind must be affected!”
-
-It was an effort for him to get out to the polls, but he went,
-beholding in that conflict, as he could in any conflict however
-confused and clouded, the issue of free men above any other issue. He
-did not get out much after that, even when that last summer the few
-remnants of the 66th regiment gathered in Urbana to hold the annual
-reunion. He could not so much as get up town to greet his old comrades,
-and they sent word that in the afternoon they would march in review
-before his home. He was wheeled out on the veranda, and there he sat
-while his old regiment, the fifty or sixty gray, broken men, marched
-past. They saluted as they went by, and he returned the salutes with
-tears streaming down the cheeks where I had never seen tears before.
-And he said with a little choking laugh:
-
-“Why, look at the boys!”
-
-It was not long after, that six of us, his grandsons, bore him out
-of the old home forever. And on his coffin were the two things that
-expressed him best, I think--his roses and his flag.
-
-
-
-
-VI
-
-
-The incalculable influence of the spoken word and the consequent
-responsibility that weighs upon the lightest phrase have so long
-been urged that men might well go about with their fingers on their
-lips, oracular as presidential candidates, deliberating each thought
-before giving it wing. And yet, as Carlyle said of French speech, the
-immeasurable tide flows on and ebbs only toward the small hours of
-the morning. Though even then in certain quarters, the tide does not
-ebb, and in those hours truths are sometimes spoken--for instance, by
-newspaper reporters, who, their night’s work done, turn to each other
-for relaxation and speak those thoughts they have not dared to write in
-their chronicles of the day that is done. The thought itself is only
-a vagrant, encountered along the way back to such an evening, when
-a reporter uttered two little words that acquired for me a profound
-significance.
-
-“Oh, nothing.” Those were the exact words, just those two, and yet a
-negative so simple contained within itself such an affirmation of an
-awful truth, that I have never been able to forget them, though for a
-time I tried. Charlie R---- and I had gone one night, after the paper
-had gone to press, into a little restaurant in Chicago to get some
-supper. It was sometime in the year 1891, and, in our idle gossip, the
-hanging of the anarchists, then an event so recent that the reporters
-now and then spoke of it, had come up in our talk.
-
-“Where were you when that occurred?” he asked.
-
-“In Toledo,” I answered.
-
-“What did people think of it there?”
-
-“Of the hanging?”
-
-“Yes.”
-
-I looked at him, I suppose, in some astonishment. What did people
-in Toledo think of the hanging of the Chicago anarchists! Could any
-question have been more stupid, more banal? What did any people,
-anywhere, think of it? What was customary, what was proper and
-appropriate and indispensable under such circumstances? In a word, what
-was there to do with anarchists except to hang them? Really, I was
-quite at a loss what to say. It seemed so superfluous, so ridiculous,
-as though he had asked what the people in Toledo thought of the world’s
-being round, or of the force of gravity. More than superfluous, it was
-callous; he might as well have asked what Toledo people thought of the
-hanging of Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, or of the suicide
-of Judas Iscariot. And I answered promptly in their defense:
-
-“Why, they thought it was right, of course.”
-
-He had his elbows on the table and was lighting a cigarette, and as
-he raised the match, his dark face, with its closely trimmed pointed
-beard, was suddenly and vividly illuminated by the yellow flame. His
-eyes were lowered, their vision fixed just then on the interesting
-process of igniting the end of the cigarette. But about his puckered
-lips, about his narrowed eyes there played a little smile, faint,
-elusive, and yet of a meaning so indubitable that it was altogether
-disconcerting. And in that instant I wondered--it could not be! It was
-preposterous, absurd!
-
-“Why?” I asked.
-
-“Oh, nothing,” he said.
-
-The end of the cigarette was glowing, little coils of fire in the tiny
-particles of tobacco; he blew out the match and the smile disappeared
-from his face with its ruddy illumination, and he tossed the charred
-stick into his coffee cup.
-
-Were there, then, two opinions? Was it possible that anyone doubted?
-When _anarchists_ were in question! Still, on that kindly face
-before me there lingered the shadow of that strange expression,
-inscrutable, perplexing, piquing curiosity. And yet by some strange,
-almost clairvoyant process, it had gradually acquired the effect of a
-persistent, irresistible and implacable authority, in the presence of
-which one felt--well, cheap, as though there were secrets from which
-one had been excluded, as though there were somewhere in this universe
-a stupendous joke which alone of all others one lacked the wit to see.
-It gave one a disturbed, uneasy sensation, a _mauvaise honte_.
-
-The innate sense of personal dignity, the instinct to retire into
-one’s self, the affectation of repose and self-sufficiency which leads
-one lightly to wave aside a subject one does not understand, to pass
-it over for other and more familiar topics--these were ineffectual.
-Curiosity perhaps in a sense much less refined than that in which
-Matthew Arnold considered it when he exalted it to the plane of the
-higher virtues, broke down reticence, and, at last I asked, and even
-begged my companion to tell me what he meant. But he was implacable; he
-had reached, it appeared, a stage of development in which the opinions
-of others were of no consequence; an altitude from which he could
-regard the race of men impersonally, and permit them to stumble on in
-error, without the desire to set them right. It was quite useless to
-question him, and in the end the only satisfaction he would give me was
-to say, with an effort of dismissing the subject:
-
-“Ask some of the boys.”
-
-For a young citizen to whom society is yet an illusion, lying, in
-Emerson’s figure, before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men
-and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the center, round which all
-arrange themselves the best they can, to have one of those oak-trees
-torn violently up by the roots, is to experience a distinct shock. And
-by two words, and an expression that played for an instant in lowered
-eyes, and about lips that were more concerned just then with the
-flattened end of a fresh cigarette than the divulgence of great truths!
-Yes, decidedly a shock, to leave one shaken for days. If there were any
-doubt as to what to do with anarchists, what was the use of going on
-with the study of the law? I went out from that cheap little restaurant
-in Fifth Avenue, into Chicago’s depressing midnight streets--and the
-oak tree never took root again. For, as Charlie R---- had lightly
-suggested, I asked the boys, and by the boys he meant, of course, the
-reporters.
-
-They were boys in spirit, though in the knowledge of this world they
-were as aged men, some of whom had seen so much of life that they
-were able to dwell with it only by refusing any longer to accept it
-seriously. They formed in that day an unusual group, gathered in the
-old Whitechapel Club, and many of their names have since become known
-to literature. They, or most of them, had worked on the anarchist
-cases, from the days of the strike in McCormick’s reaper works, down
-to the night when the vivid pen of Charlie Seymour could describe the
-spark that soared in a parabolic curve from the alley into Haymarket
-Square, and then to the black morning of the hanging; and they knew.
-
-It was all very simple, too. If it were not for the tragedy, and the
-wrong that is so much worse than any tragedy, one might almost laugh at
-the simplicity. It shows the power of words, the force of phrases, the
-obdurate and terrible tyranny of a term. The men who had been hanged
-were called anarchists, when, as it happens, they were men, just men.
-And out of that original error in terminology there was evolved that
-overmastering fear which raved and slew in a frenzy of passion that
-decades hence will puzzle the psychologist who studies the mind of
-the crowd. And the student of ethics will find in the event another
-proof of the inerrancy and power of that old law of moral action and
-reaction, according to which hatred ceaseth not by hatred, but by love
-alone. It may be found stated accurately and simply in the Sermon on
-the Mount, and there is still hope that Christendom, after another
-thousand years or so, may discover it, and drawing therefrom the law of
-social relations, apply it to human affairs, and so solve the problems
-that trouble and perplex mankind.
-
-
-
-
-VII
-
-
-In speaking of the group of newspaper writers who formed the
-Whitechapel Club, augmented as they were by artists, and musicians
-and physicians and lawyers, I would not give the impression that they
-were in any sense reformers, or actuated by the smug and forbidding
-spirit which too often inspires that species. They were, indeed,
-wisely otherwise, and they were, I think, wholly right minded in their
-attitude toward what are called public questions, and of these they had
-a deep and perspicacious understanding, and it will be easy to imagine
-that the cursory comments on passing phases of the human spectacle of
-such minds as those of Charles Goodyear Seymour, Finley Peter Dunne,
-George Ade, Ben King, Opie Reed, Alfred Henry Lewis, and his brother
-William E. Lewis, Frederick Upham Adams, Thomas E. Powers, Horace
-Taylor, Wallace Rice, Arthur Henry, and a score of others were apt to
-be entertaining and instructive, though they were uttered with such wit
-and humor that they were never intended to be instructive.
-
-The club had been founded late in the eighties, and although it endured
-less than ten years, it still lives in the minds of newspaper and
-literary men as one of the most remarkable of Bohemian clubs. It had
-its rooms in the rear of a little saloon, conducted by Henry Koster in
-“newspaper alley,” as Calhoun Place was more generally called, near
-the buildings of the _Chicago News_ and the _Chicago Herald_, and it
-somehow gathered to itself many of the clever men of Chicago who were
-writing for the press, and a few intimate spirits in other lines of
-work, but of sympathetic spirit. For a while the club was nameless, but
-one afternoon a group were sitting in one of the rooms when a newsboy
-passed through the alley and cried: “All about the latest Whitechapel
-murder!” Seymour paused with a stein of beer half lifted, and said:
-“We’ll call the new club the ‘Whitechapel Club.’”
-
-I suppose the grewsome connotations of the name led to our practice
-of collecting relics of the tragedies we were constantly reporting.
-When he came back from the Dakotas, where he had been reporting the
-Sioux War, Seymour brought back from the battles a number of skulls of
-Indians, and blankets drenched in blood, which were hung on the walls
-of the club. From that time on it became the practice of sheriffs
-and newspaper men everywhere to send anything of that kind to the
-Whitechapel Club. The result was that within a few years it had a large
-collection of skulls of criminals, and some physicians discovered,
-or thought they discovered, differences between these skulls and the
-skulls of those who were not criminals, or, if they were, had not been
-caught at it.
-
-These and the ropes of hangmen and the various mementos of crimes were
-the decorations of the club rooms, and on Saturday nights the hollow
-eyes of those skulls looked down on many a lively scene.
-
-Admission to the club was obtained in a peculiar way. An applicant
-for membership had his name proposed, and it was then posted on a
-bulletin-board. He was on probation for thirty days, during which he
-had to be at the club at least five days in the week, in order to
-become acquainted with the members. Within that time any member could
-tear his name down, and that ended his candidacy. When his name finally
-came up for voting it required the full vote of the club to get him in.
-
-And then we grew prosperous, and acquiring a building farther down the
-alley, we had it decorated in a somber manner, with a notable table,
-shaped like a coffin, around which we gathered. But the prosperity and
-the fame of the club led to its end. Rich and important men of Chicago
-sought membership. Some were admitted, then more, and as a result the
-club lost its Bohemian character, and finally disbanded.
-
-
-
-
-VIII
-
-
-Those who are able to recall the symposium of these minds will no doubt
-always see the humorous face of Charlie Seymour as the center of the
-coterie, a young man with such a _flair_ for what was news, with such
-an instinct for word values, such real ability as a writer, and such
-a quaint and original strain of humor as to make him the peer of any,
-a young man who would have gone far and high could he have lived. An
-early fate overtook him, as it overtook Charlie Perkins and Charlie
-Almy and Ben King, but their fate had the mellowing kindness of the
-fact that all who knew them can never think of them, with however much
-regret, without a smile at some remembered instance of their unfailing
-humor.
-
-When I mentioned them, I had fully intended to give some instances of
-that humor, but when it was not of a raciness, it was of such a rare
-and delicate charm, such a fleeting, evanescent quality, that it is
-impossible to separate it from all that was going on about it. It is
-easy enough to recall if not to evoke again the scene in which Ben
-King and Charlie Almy, sitting for three hours at a stretch, gave a
-wholly impromptu impersonation of two solemn missionaries just returned
-from some unmapped wilderness and recounting their deeds in order to
-inspire contributions; it is not difficult either to recall the slight
-figure of Charlie Seymour, with his red hair, his comedian’s droll
-face, and to listen to him recounting those adventures which life
-was ever offering him, whether on one of his many journeys as a war
-correspondent to the region of the Dakotas when his friends among the
-Ogallalla and Brûlé Sioux were on the war-path again, or in some less
-picturesque tragedy he had been reporting nearer home--say a murder in
-South Clark Street; but, like so many of the keener joys of life, the
-charm of his stories was fleeting and gone with the moment that gave
-them.
-
-His humor colored everything he wrote, as the humor of Finley Peter
-Dunne colored everything he wrote; and both were skilled in the art
-of the news story. We were all reading Kipling in those days, and
-Mr. Dunne was so clever in adapting his terse style to the needs
-of the daily reportorial life that when one night a private shot a
-comrade in the barracks at Fort Sheridan, and Mr. Dunne was detailed
-to report the tragedy, he found it in every detail so exactly like
-Kipling’s story “In the Matter of a Private,” that he was overcome by
-the despair of having to write a tale that had already been told. He
-resisted the temptation, if there was any temptation, nobly and wrote
-the tale with a bald simplicity that no doubt enhanced its effect.
-He had not then begun to report the Philosophy of Mr. Dooley, though
-there was a certain Irishman in Chicago responsive to the name of
-Colonel Thomas Jefferson Dolan, whom, in his capacity of First Ward
-Democrat, Mr. Dunne frequently interviewed for his paper without the
-cramping influences of a previous visitation on the Colonel, and these
-interviews showed much of the color and spirit of those Dooley articles
-which later were to make him famous. He already knew, of course,
-and frequently enjoyed communion with the prototype of Mr. Dooley,
-Mr. James McGarry, who had a quaint philosophy of his own which Mr.
-Dunne one day rendered in a little article entitled “Mr. McGarry’s
-Philosophy.” The familiarity so wounded Mr. McGarry, however (he
-was a man of simple dignity and some sensitiveness), that Mr. Dunne
-thereafter adopted another name for the personage through which he was
-so long and so brilliantly to express himself, though it was not until
-after the Spanish War that the wide public was to recognize the talent
-which was already so abundantly recognized by Mr. Dunne’s friends.
-
-Charlie Seymour did not read as much as some of his companions;
-perhaps it was that fact that gave such an original flavor to what he
-wrote. His elder brother, Mr. Horatio W. Seymour, was the editor of
-the _Herald_, a newspaper famed for the taste and even beauty of its
-typographical appearance. It looked somewhat like the New York _Sun_,
-and under Mr. Seymour was as carefully edited. It was the organ of
-the Democracy in the northwest, and I suppose no direct or immediate
-influence was more potent in bringing on the wide Democratic victory in
-the congressional election of 1890 than the brilliant editorials on the
-tariff which Mr. Horatio Seymour wrote. They were, I remember, one of
-the delights of Frank Hurd, and it was through Hurd’s influence that I
-was on the staff of that paper, reporting political events.
-
-We were all more or less employed in reporting political events in
-that stirring year, and were kept busy in following and recording the
-sayings of the orators of both parties. It was characteristic of Mr.
-Dunne that after a sober column giving the gist of a speech by Joseph
-B. Foraker, then lately governor, and afterward senator of Ohio, in
-which he waved the bloody shirt in the fiery manner which in those
-days characterized him, Mr. Dunne should have concluded his article
-sententiously: “Then the audience went out to get the latest news of
-the battle of Gettysburg.”
-
-But it was typical of Charlie Seymour that when he was detailed to
-accompany Thomas B. Reed, Speaker of the Billion Dollar Congress, he
-should have been so fascinated by the whiskers of the Illinois farmers
-who crowded about the rear platform of the Speaker’s train, that he
-devoted half a column to a description of those adornments which long
-was celebrated as a classic in the traditions of Chicago reporters, to
-be recalled by them as they would recall, for instance, certain of the
-sayings of the late Joseph Medill.
-
-Mr. Medill, of course, moved in an element far above that which was
-natural to the reporters, and the figure of the great editor of the
-_Tribune_ filled the imagination completely. I used to like his
-low-tariff editorials, though they became high-tariff editorials during
-national campaigns, the rate of percentage of protection rising like a
-thermometer in the heat of political excitement,--a tendency the rate
-invariably reveals the nearer its objective is approached.
-
-Mr. Medill, as was well known, was not an admirer of President
-Harrison, and there came down into our world an evidence of the
-fact in a story which Mr. Frank Brooks, a political writer on the
-_Tribune_, told us. It was at the time that President Harrison made
-one of those speaking tours which, beginning with President Johnson’s
-“swing around the circle,” have grown increasingly familiar to those
-of the electorate who observe their presidents and rush to the railway
-station to hear them speaking as they flash by. His managing editor had
-assigned Mr. Brooks to go to Galesburg, catch the President’s special
-and make the journey with him, and just as he was giving directions as
-to the column or two which Mr. Brooks was to send in daily, Mr. Medill
-went shuffling through the editorial room, bearing a great pile of
-those foreign exchanges he was so fond of reading. The managing editor
-explained to Mr. Medill the mission he was committing to Mr. Brooks,
-and the old editor stood a moment looking at them, then raised his
-ear-trumpet and said in his queer voice:
-
-“What did you say?”
-
-“I said, I’d just been telling Mr. Brooks to go down to Galesburg
-to-night, catch the President’s special, and send us a column or so
-each night of his speeches.”
-
-“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Medill, and then he drily added: “_What for?_”
-
-
-
-
-IX
-
-
-It was, of course, for a young correspondent who hod an eager curiosity
-about life, an interesting experience to go on a journey like that, and
-it was with delight that, one snowy morning in the late autumn of that
-year, I left Chicago to go on a little trip down through Indiana with
-James G. Blaine. He was the secretary of state in President Harrison’s
-cabinet, a position in which, as it turned out, he was unhappy, as most
-men are apt to be in public positions, though a sort of cruel and evil
-fascination will not let them give up the vain pursuit of them, vainest
-perhaps when they are won. When I reached the station that morning,
-Mr. Blaine was already there, walking up and down the platform arm in
-arm with his son Emmons. He was a gray man, dressed in gray clothes,
-with spats made of the cloth of his habit, and there was about him
-an air of vague sadness, which in his high countenance became almost
-a pain, though just then, in the companionship of the son he loved,
-there was, for a little while, the expression of a mild happiness,
-maybe a solace. His face was of a grayish, almost luminous pallor, and
-his silver hair and beard were in the same key. William Walter Phelps,
-then our minister to Germany, was traveling with him, and on our way
-down to South Bend the constant entrance of plain citizens from the
-other coaches into our car filled Mr. Phelps with a kind of wonder.
-Commercial travelers, farmers, all sorts and conditions of men, entered
-and introduced themselves to Mr. Blaine, and he sat and talked with
-them all in that simplicity which marks the manners, even if it has
-departed the spirit of the republic.
-
-“It is a remarkable sight you are witnessing,” said Mr. Phelps to us
-reporters, “a sight you could witness in no other country in the world.
-There is the premier of a great government, and yet the commonest man
-may approach him without ceremony, and talk to him as though he were
-nobody.”
-
-Fresh from his life at a foreign court, he was viewing events from
-that foreign point of view, perhaps thinking just then in European
-sequences, and since there was such simplicity, it was not hard for
-any of us to have conversation with our premier. Mr. Blaine had just
-come from Ohio where he had been speaking in McKinley’s district, and
-he understood the political situation so perfectly that he said, in the
-frankness of a conversation that was not to be reported, that McKinley
-was certain to be defeated; indeed he foresaw, though it required no
-very great vision to do that, the reverse that was to overtake his
-party in the congressional elections.
-
-With my interest in the tariff question, which then seemed to me so
-fundamental, I did not lose the opportunity to ask Mr. Blaine about
-his reciprocity project: but after a while the conversation turned
-to more personal subjects. When he learned that I was from Ohio, he
-asked me suddenly if I could name the counties that formed the several
-congressional districts of the state. I could not, of course, do that,
-and I supposed no one in the world could do it or ever wish to do it;
-but he could, and with a naïve pride in the accomplishment he did, and
-then astounded me by saying that he could almost match the feat with
-any state in the Union.
-
-It was the only enthusiasm the poor man showed all that day, and
-when we reached South Bend, there was a _contretemps_ that might
-have afforded Mr. Phelps further food for reflection on the lack of
-ceremony in America. When the premier stepped off the train into the
-wet mass of snow that covered the dirty platform of the ugly little
-station, there was nowhere to be seen any evidence of a reception
-for the distinguished guest. There was an old hack, or ’bus, one of
-those rattling, shambling, moth-eaten vehicles that await the incoming
-train at every small town in our land, with a team of forlorn horses
-depressed by the weather or by life, but there was no committee of
-eminent citizens, no band, nothing. The scene was bare and bleak and
-cold, and the premier was plainly disgusted.
-
-He stood there a moment and looked about him undecided, while Mr.
-Phelps with sympathetic concern displayed great willingness to serve,
-but was as helpless as his chief. The American sovereigns who were
-loafing by the station shed looked on with the reticent detachment
-which characterizes the rural American. And then the train slowly
-pulled out and left us, and Mr. Blaine cast at it a glance of longing
-and of reproach, as though in its sundering of the last tie with the
-world of comfort, he had suffered the final indignity. There seemed to
-be no course other than to take the ’bus, when suddenly a committee
-rushed up, out of breath and out of countenance, and with a chorus
-of apologies explained that they had met the wrong train, or gone to
-another station, and so bore the premier off in triumph to dine at some
-rich man’s house.
-
-The day seemed to grow worse as it progressed, as days ill begun have
-a way of doing, and when the premier in the afternoon appeared at the
-meeting he was to address, his spirits had not improved, and even if
-they had, the meeting was one to depress the spirits of any man. It
-assembled in a barren hall, a kind of skating rink, or something of the
-sort, that would have served better for a boxing match. The audience
-was small, and standing about in the mud and slush they had “tramped
-in,” to use our midwestern phrase, they displayed that bucolic
-indifference which can daunt the most exuberant speaker. It was in no
-way worthy of the man, and Mr. Blaine spoke with evident difficulty,
-and so wholly lacked spirit and enthusiasm that it was impossible for
-him to warm up to his subject. The speech was of that perfunctory sort
-which such an atmosphere compels, one of those speeches the speaker
-drags out, a word at a time, and is glad to be done with, and Mr.
-Blaine bore with his fates a little while, and then almost abruptly
-closed. He spoke on the tariff issue, and in defense of the McKinley
-Bill, and in marshaling the evidences of our glory and prosperity,
-all of which he attributed to the direct influence of the protective
-tariff system, he mentioned the number of miles of railroad that had
-been built, and even the increase in the nation’s population! The
-speech and the occasion afforded an opportunity to a newspaper of the
-opposition, which in those days of silly partizanship, was not to be
-overlooked. I went back to the little hotel and wrote my story, and
-since I had all the while in my mind not only partizan advantage, but
-the smiles that would break out on the countenances of Charlie Seymour
-and Peter Dunne and the other boys gathered in the Whitechapel Club I
-did not minimise the effect of all those babies who had come to life as
-a result of the protective tariff, nor all those ironical difficulties
-the day had heaped upon the great man. It was not, perhaps, quite fair,
-nor quite nice, but it was as fair and as nice as newspaper ethics
-and political etiquette--if there are such things--require, and Mr.
-Blaine himself most have had some consciousness of his partial failure,
-some dissatisfaction with his effort, for I was just about to put my
-story on the wire at six o’clock when he appeared, with his rich host,
-and asked for me. I talked to him through the little wicket of the
-telegraph office, and the conversation began inauspiciously by the rich
-man’s peremptorily commanding me to let him see my stuff; he wished,
-he said, to “look it over”! I was not as patient with his presumption
-then as I think I could be now, for I had not learned that it was the
-factory system that produces such types, men who bully the women at
-home and the women and clerks and operatives in their shops, and I
-denied him the right, of course. He became very angry, and blustered
-through the little window, while the operator, an old telegrapher I
-had known in Toledo, sat behind me waiting to send the story clicking
-into Chicago on _The Herald’s_ wire. After the rich man had exhausted
-himself, Mr. Blaine took his place at the window and in a mild and calm
-manner, asked me for my copy, saying that he was not well, and that
-he had made some slips in his speech which he did not care to have go
-to the country. It was those unfortunate or fortunate babies of the
-protective tariff system, and he said that the correspondent of a press
-association had agreed to make the excisions if I would do so, and he
-would consider it a favor if I would oblige him.
-
-The charm of his manner had been on me all that day, and I had been
-feeling sorry for him all day, too, and I was sorrier for him then
-than ever, and half ashamed of some of the things I had written, but
-I explained to him that I had been sent by my paper in the hope that
-he might say something to the disadvantage of his own cause, and that
-my duty was to report, at least, what he had said. It was one of the
-hardest “noes” I ever had to say, and at last as he turned away, I
-regretted, perhaps more than he, and certainly more than he ever knew,
-that I could not let him revise his speech--since that is what most of
-us desire to do with most of our speeches.
-
-When that campaign ended in the overthrow of the Republican majority in
-Congress, and I was sent to interview Ben Butterworth on the result,
-he said, in his humorous way: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken
-away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” He was not altogether cast
-down by the result; in his place in Congress as a representative from
-a Cincinnati district he had risen to denounce the tariff, and so had
-his consolation. To me it seemed as if the people had at last entered
-the promised land, that that was the day the Lord had made for his
-people, but Mr. Butterworth could point out that our government was not
-so democratic as the British government, for instance, since it was
-not so responsive to the people’s will. Over there, of course, after
-such a reverse the government would have retired, and a new one would
-have been formed, but here the existing administration would remain in
-power two years longer, and then, even if it lost in the presidential
-election over a year must elapse before a new Congress would convene,
-so that the millennium was postponed a good three years at least.
-
-
-
-
-X
-
-
-However, there were other interests and other delights with which to
-occupy one’s self meanwhile, not the least of which was Mr. Butterworth
-himself. He was then out of Congress and in Chicago as Solicitor
-General of the World’s Columbian Exposition, for which Chicago was
-preparing. For a while I was relieved from writing about politics, and
-assigned to the World’s Fair, and there were so many distinguished men
-from all over the nation associated in that enterprise that it was
-very much like politics in its superficial aspects. There was, for
-instance, the World’s Columbian Commission, a body created under the
-authority of Congress, composed of two commissioners from each state,
-appointed by its governor, and that body exactly the size of the senate
-was like it in personnel and character. The witty Thomas E. Palmer of
-Michigan was its president, and there were among its membership such
-men as Judge Lindsay, later senator from Kentucky, Judge Harris of
-Virginia, who looked like George Washington, and many other delightful
-and pungent characters. But no personality among them all was more
-interesting than Colonel James A. McKenzie, Judge Lindsay’s colleague
-from Kentucky. He was tall and spare of frame, and his long moustache
-and goatee, and the great black slouch hat he wore made him in
-appearance the typical southerner of the popular imagination. He was
-indeed the typical southerner by every right and tradition, by birth,
-by his services in the Confederate army, by his stately courtesy, by
-his love of sentiment and the picturesque, by his wit and humor and
-eloquence, and his fondness for phrases. His humor sparkled in his kind
-blue eyes, and it overflowed in that brilliant conversation with which
-he delighted everyone about him; he could entertain you by the hour
-with his comments on all phases of that life in which he found such
-zest. He had been known as “Quinine Jim,” because as congressman he
-had secured the reduction or the abolition of the duty on that drug,
-so indispensable in malarial lands. He was fond of striking phrases;
-he it was who had referred to Blaine as a Florentine mosaic; and his
-reference to Mrs. Cleveland as “the uncrowned queen of America” had
-delighted the Democratic convention at St. Louis which renominated her
-husband for the presidency. And again at Chicago, on that memorable
-night of oratory in 1892 in seconding the nomination of Cleveland on
-behalf of Kentucky he stood on a chair and referred to his state as the
-commonwealth “in which, thank God, the damned lie is the first lick,
-where the women are so beautiful that the aurora borealis blushes with
-shame, where the whiskey is so good as to make intoxication a virtue,
-and the horses so fleet that lightning in comparison is but a puling
-paralytic.”
-
-During one of many pleasant afternoons in the old Grand Pacific Hotel
-he began to tell us something about the chronic office holders to
-be found in the capital of his state, as in most states, and said:
-“If God in a moment of enthusiasm should see fit to snatch them to
-His bosom I should regard it as a dispensation of divine providence
-in which I could acquiesce with a fervor that would be turbulent and
-even riotous.” It was in this stream of exaggeration and hyperbole
-that he talked all the time, but with the coming of the winter of that
-year my opportunities of listening to him were cut off. I was sent to
-Springfield to report the sessions of the legislature. In the spring
-a bill was under discussion for the appropriation of a large sum in
-aid of the World’s Fair, and when the usual opposition developed among
-those country members who have so long governed our cities in dislike
-and distrust of the people in them, a delegation came down from Chicago
-to lobby for the measure. It was not long until it was evident that
-they were not making much headway; the difference, the distinction
-in their dress and manner, their somewhat too lofty style were only
-making matters worse. I took it upon myself to telegraph to James W.
-Scott, the publisher of _The Herald_, apprising him of the situation,
-and suggesting that Colonel McKenzie be sent down to reënforce them.
-I felt that he would perhaps understand the country members better
-because he understood humanity better, and besides, I wished to see
-him again and hear his stories and funny sayings. He came, and after
-he had associated with the members a day or so, and they had seen him
-draw Kentucky “twist” from the deep pocket of the long tails of his
-coat, and on one or two occasions had watched him gently pinch into a
-julep the tender sprigs of mint the spring had brought to Springfield,
-the appropriation for some reason was made. While he was there he said
-he wished to visit the tomb of Lincoln, and it was with pride that I
-got an open carriage and drove him, on an incomparable morning in June,
-out to Oak Ridge cemetery. He was in a solemn mood that morning; the
-visit had a meaning for him; he had fought on the other side in the
-great war, but he had a better conception of the character of the noble
-martyr than many a northerner, especially of the day when that tomb
-was built, certainly a nobler conception of that lofty character than
-is expressed in Mead’s cruel war groups--as though Lincoln had been
-merely some shoulder-strapped murderer of his fellow men! The Colonel
-had never been there before, and it was an occasion for him, and for
-me, too, though every time I went there it was for me an occasion, as
-my sojourn in Springfield was an opportunity, to induce those who had
-known Lincoln to talk about him.
-
-The tomb has a chamber in its base where there were stored a number of
-things; the place, indeed, was a sort of cheap museum, and you paid to
-enter there and listen to an aged custodian lecture on the “relics,”
-and thrill the gaping onlooker with the details of the attempt to
-steal the body, and buy a book about it, if you were morbid and silly
-enough. The custodian began his lecture in that chamber, and then led
-you out into the sunlight again, and up on the base of the monument,
-and showed you the bronze fighters, and at last, took you down into the
-crypt, on the brow of the little down that overlooks the cemetery.
-
-There at last Colonel McKenzie stood beside the sarcophagus and after
-a while the custodian came to the end of his rigmarole, and, by some
-mercy, was still. And I stood aside and looked at the old Confederate
-officer, standing there in that cool entrance, beside the very tomb of
-Lincoln. He stood with his arms folded on his breast, his tall form
-slightly bent, his big hat in his hand, and his white head bowed; he
-stood there a long time, in the perfect silence of that June morning,
-with thoughts, I suppose, that might have made an epic.
-
-When at last he turned away and went around to the front of the
-monument, and we were about to enter our carriage, he turned, and still
-uncovered, over the little gate in the low fence that enclosed the
-spot, he paused and gave his hand to the old custodian, and said:
-
-“Colonel, I wish to express to you my appreciation of the privilege
-I have had this morning of paying my respects at the shrine of the
-greatest American that ever lived.”
-
-He said it solemnly and sincerely, and then, still holding the
-delighted old fellow’s hand, he went on in profound gravity:
-
-“And I cannot go away without expressing my sense of satisfaction
-in the eloquent oration you have delivered on this occasion. I was
-particularly impressed, sir, by its evident lack of previous thought
-and preparation.”
-
-
-
-
-XI
-
-
-That was the legislature which elected John M. Palmer to the United
-States Senate from Illinois. The election was accomplished only after a
-memorable deadlock of two months in which the Democrats of the general
-assembly stood so nobly, shoulder to shoulder, that they were called
-“The Immortal 101.” When they were finally reënforced by the votes of
-two members elected as representatives of the Farmers’ Alliance, and
-elected their man, they had a gold medal struck to commemorate their
-own heroism. They were not, perhaps, exactly immortal, but they did
-stand for their principles so stanchly that when they came to celebrate
-their victory, some of their orators compared them to those other
-immortals who held Thermopylæ.
-
-Their principle was the popular election of United States senators, and
-they had a fine exemplar of democracy in their candidate. He had been
-nominated by a state convention, as had Lincoln, whom General Palmer
-had known intimately and had supported both for senator and president.
-He was the last of those great figures of Illinois whom the times
-immediately preceding the Civil War had so abundantly brought forth.
-He had commanded an army corps, he had been governor of his state, and
-in 1872 a presidential possibility in the Republican party. But he had
-turned to the Democrats, and after he became their senator, the first
-Illinois had known since Douglas, he became a presidential possibility
-in the Democratic party; that was in 1892, and whatever chances he had
-he destroyed himself by coming on from Washington and declaring for
-Grover Cleveland.
-
-Four years later he was nominated for the presidency by the
-conservative faction of his party. He told me, when I was finishing
-my law studies under him, that he had never lost anything politically
-by bolting any of the several parties he had been in, but had usually
-gained in self respect by doing so; and if to the politician his whole
-career presented inconsistencies, to the man of principle he must seem
-wholly consistent and sincere. Certain it is that he followed that
-inward spirit which alone can guide a man through the perplexities of
-life, and so the principle with him came ever before the party.
-
-He was a simple man with simple tastes, and his very simplicity was
-an element of that dignity which seemed to belong to other times than
-ours. The familiar figure of him along the quiet streets of Springfield
-was pleasing to men and to children alike; he would go along erectly
-and slowly under his great broad hat, a striking figure with his
-plentiful white hair, his closely trimmed chin whiskers, the broad,
-smoothly shaven upper lip distinguishing a countenance that was of
-a type associated with the earlier ideals of the republic, and the
-market basket he carried on his arm helped this effect. At home he was
-delightful; he had a viol, and used to play it, if there were not too
-many about to hear him, and if he were alone, sing a few staves of
-old songs, like “Darling Nelly Gray,” and “Rosie Lee, Courting Down
-in Tennessee,” and some of the old tunes he had learned in Kentucky
-as a boy. He liked poetry, if it were not of the introspective modern
-mood, and while I have heard of such extraordinary characters, I never
-believed the stories of their endurance, until I was able to discover
-in him one man who actually did read Sir Walter Scott’s novels through
-every year. For the most part he had some member of his family read
-them to him, and he found in them the naïve pleasure of a child. I
-used to think I would remember the things he was always saying, and
-the stories he was always telling about Lincoln or Douglas or Grant,
-but I never could keep note-books and the more imposing sayings have
-departed. Yet there flashes before the memory with the detail of a
-cinematograph that scene of a winter’s evening when I entered the big
-living-room in his home and there found him with his wife before the
-great open fire. She was reading aloud to him from “Ivanhoe.”
-
-“Come in, Mr. Brand,” he always addressed me by prefixing “Mr.” to my
-Christian name. “Come in,” he called in his hearty voice. “We are just
-storming a castle.”
-
-He lived on to the century’s end, with a sort of gusto in life that
-never failed, I think, until that day when he attended the funeral
-of the last of his old contemporaries, General John M. McClernand,
-that fierce old warrior who had quarreled with Grant and lived on in
-Springfield until he could fight no more with anyone. Senator Palmer
-came home from his funeral amused by the fact that McClernand had
-been buried in the full uniform of a major-general, which he had not
-worn, I suppose, since Vicksburg. When some member of Senator Palmer’s
-household asked him if he should like to be buried in his uniform, he
-shook his head against it, but added:
-
-“It was all right for Mac; it was like him.”
-
-But the end was in his thoughts; Oglesby was gone, and now McClernand
-as the last of the men with whom he had fought in the great crisis, and
-he went, pretty soon after that, himself. He had participated in two
-great revolutionary epochs of his nation, going through the one and
-penetrating though not so far into the second, a long span of life and
-experience.
-
-It was perhaps natural that he should not have divined the implications
-of the second phase as clearly as he did those of the first; and though
-he had helped to inaugurate the new movement, the latest urge toward
-democracy in this land, he could not go so far. He was young in ’56 and
-old in ’96, and as we grow old we grow conservative, whether we would
-or not, and much, I suppose, in the same way.
-
-
-
-
-XII
-
-
-Senator Palmer’s victory in 1891, however, had raised the hopes of the
-Illinois Democracy for 1892, and it was early in that year that I came
-to know one of the most daring pioneers of the neo-democratic movement
-in America, and the most courageous spirit of our times.
-
-It was on a cold raw morning that I met Joseph P. Mahony, then a
-Democratic member of the State Senate, who said:
-
-“Come with me and I’ll introduce you to the next governor of Illinois.”
-
-It was the time of year when one was meeting the next governor of
-Illinois in most of the hotel corridors, or men who were trying to look
-like potential governors of Illinois, so that such a remark was not to
-be taken too literally; but I went, and after ascending to an upper
-floor of a narrow little building in Adams Street, we entered a suite
-of law offices, and there in a very much crowded, a very much littered
-and a rather dingy little private room, at an odd little walnut desk,
-sat John P. Altgeld.
-
-The figure was not prepossessing; he wore his hair close-clipped in
-ultimate surrender to an obstinate cowlick; his beard was closely
-trimmed, too, and altogether the countenance was one made for the hands
-of the cartoonists, who in the brutal fury that was so soon to blaze
-upon him and to continue to blaze until it had consumed him quite,
-could easily contort the features to the various purposes of an ugly
-partizanship; they gave it a peculiarly sinister quality, and it is one
-of the countless ironies of life that a face, sad with all the utter
-woe of humanity, should have become for a season, and in some minds
-remained forever, the type and symbol of all that is most abhorrent.
-There was a peculiar pallor in the countenance, and the face was such
-a blank mask of suffering and despair that, had it not been for the
-high intelligence that shone from his eyes, it must have impressed
-many as altogether lacking in expression. Certainly it seldom or never
-expressed enthusiasm, or joy, or humor, though he had humor of a
-certain mordant kind, as many a political opponent was to know.
-
-He had been a judge of the Circuit Court, and was known by his
-occasional addresses, his interviews and articles, as a publicist of
-radical and humanitarian tendencies. He was known especially to the
-laboring classes and to the poor, who, by that acute sympathy they
-possess, divined in him a friend, and in the circles of sociological
-workers and students, then so small and obscure as to make their views
-esoteric, he was recognized as one who understood and sympathized with
-their tendencies and ideals. He was accounted in those days a wealthy
-man,--he was just then building one of those tall and ugly structures
-of steel called “sky-scrapers,”--and now that he was spoken of for
-governor this fact made him seem “available” to the politicians. Also
-he had a German name, another asset in Illinois just then, when Germans
-all over the state felt themselves outraged by legislation concerning
-the “little red school-house,” which the Republicans had enacted when
-they were in full power in the state.
-
-But my paper did not share this enthusiasm about him; it happened to
-be owned by John R. Walsh, and between Walsh and Altgeld there was a
-feud, a feud that cost Altgeld his fortune, and lasted until the day
-that death found him poor and crushed by all the tragedy which a closer
-observer, one with a keener prescience of destiny than I, might have
-read in his face from the first.
-
-The feeling of the paper, if one may so personalize a corporation as
-to endow it with emotion, was not corrected by his nomination, and
-_The Herald_ had little to say of him, and what it did say was given
-out in the perfunctory tone of a party organ. But as the summer wore
-on, and I was able to report to my editors that all the signs pointed
-to Altgeld’s election, I was permitted to write an article in which
-I tried to describe his personality and to give some impression of
-the able campaign he was making. Horace Taylor drew some pictures to
-illustrate it, and I had the satisfaction of knowing that it gave
-Altgeld pleasure, while at the same time to me at least it revealed for
-an instant the humanness of the man.
-
-He sent for me--he was then in offices in his new sky-scraper--and
-asked if I could procure for him Horace Taylor’s pictures; he hesitated
-a moment, and then, as though it were a weakness his Spartan nature was
-reluctant to reveal, he told me that he intended to have my article
-republished in a newspaper in Mansfield, Ohio, the town whence he had
-come, where he had taught school, and where he had met the gracious
-lady who was his wife. He talked for a while that afternoon about his
-youth, about his poverty and his struggles, and then suddenly lapsed
-into a silence, with his eyes fastened on me. I wondered what he was
-looking at; his gaze was disconcerting, and it made me self-conscious
-and uneasy, till he said:
-
-“Where could one get a cravat like the one you have on?”
-
-It was, I remember--because of the odd incident--an English scarf of
-blue, quite new. I had tried to knot it as Ben Cable of the Democratic
-National Committee knotted his, and it seemed that such a little
-thing should not be wanting to the happiness of a man who, by all the
-outward standards, had so much to gratify him as Altgeld had, and I
-said--with some embarrassment, and some doubt as to the taste I was
-exhibiting--“Why, you may have this one.”
-
-In a moment his face changed, the mask fell, and he shook his head and
-said: “No, it would not look like that on me.”
-
-After his election it was suggested to me that I might become
-his secretary, but I declined; in my travels over the state as a
-political correspondent I was always meeting aged men, seemingly quite
-respectable and worthy and entirely well meaning, who were introduced
-not so much by name as such and such a former governor’s private
-secretary; though like the moor which Browning crossed, they had
-
-        ... names of their own,
-  And a certain use in the world, no doubt.
-
-But I did take a position in the office of the secretary of state that
-offered the opportunity I had been longing for; I wished to finish
-my law studies, and, deeper down than any ambition for the bar, I was
-nourishing a desire to write, or if it does not seem too pretentious,
-an ambition in literature; and neither of these aims could well be
-accomplished, say from midnight on, after working all day on a morning
-newspaper.
-
-It was a pleasant change. Springfield was lovely in the spring, which
-came to it earlier than it visited Chicago, and it was a relief to
-escape the horrid atmosphere of a great brutal city which as a reporter
-it had seemed my fate to behold for the most part at night. There was a
-sense of spaciousness in the green avenues of the quiet town, and there
-was pleasant society, and better perhaps than all there were two big
-libraries in the Capitol, the law library of the Supreme Court and the
-state library; and after the noisy legislature had adjourned a peace
-fell on the great, cool stone pile that was almost academic.
-
-Twice or thrice a day Governor Altgeld was to be seen passing
-through its vast corridors, his head bent thoughtfully, rapt afar
-from the things about him in those dreams of social amelioration
-which had visited him so much earlier than they came to most of his
-contemporaries. He had read much, and during his residence there the
-executive mansion had the atmosphere of intellectual culture. Whenever
-I went over there, which I did now and then with his secretary for
-luncheon or for an evening at cards, our talk was almost always of
-books.
-
-We were all reading George Meredith in those days, and Meredith’s
-greater contemporary, Thomas Hardy. “Tess” had just appeared, and
-it would be about that time that “Jude” was running as a serial in
-_Harper’s Magazine_, though with many elisions and under its tentative
-titles of “The Simpleton” and “Hearts Insurgent”; and we all fell
-completely under a fascination which has never failed of its weird
-and mysterious charm, so that I have read all his works, down to his
-latest poems, over and over again. Hardy is, perhaps, the greatest
-intelligence on our planet now that Tolstoy, from whom he so vastly
-differed, is gone, and Altgeld’s whole career might have served him,
-had he ever chosen to write of those experiences that are less implicit
-in human nature, and more explicit in the superficial aspects of public
-careers, as an example of his own pagan theory of the contrariety of
-human affairs and the spite of the Ironic Spirits.
-
-I was reading, too, the novels of Mr. William Dean Howells, as I always
-have been whenever there was a moment to spare, and it was with a shock
-of peculiar delight and a sense of corroboration almost authoritative
-that I learned that Mr. Howells also had given voice to those very same
-profound and troubling convictions which Charlie R---- had set me on
-the track of two years before.
-
-
-
-
-XIII
-
-
-It was not in any one of Mr. Howells’s novels or essays, except
-inferentially, that I learned this, but among some musty documents the
-worms were eating up away down in the foundations of the State House.
-
-My work in the office of the secretary of state involved the care of
-the state’s archives. The oldest of these were stored in a vault in
-the cellar of the huge pile, and the discovery had just been made that
-some kind of insect, which the state entomologist knew all about,
-was riddling those records with little holes,--piercing them through
-and through. In consequence a new vault was prepared, and steel
-filing cases were set up in it, and the records removed to this safer
-sanctuary.
-
-It was a tedious and stupid task, until we came one day to file what
-were called the papers in the anarchist case. Officially they related
-to the application for the commutation of the sentences of the four
-men, Spies, Engel, Fischer, and Parsons, who had been hanged, and for
-the pardon of the three who were then confined in the penitentiary
-at Joliet, Fielden and Schwab for life, and old Oscar Neebe for
-fifteen years. Fielden and Schwab had been sentenced to death with
-the four who had been killed, but Governor Oglesby had commuted their
-sentences to imprisonment for life; Neebe’s original sentence had
-been for the fifteen years he was then serving. The papers consisted
-of communications to the governor, great petitions, and letters and
-telegrams, many sent in mercy, and some in the spirit of reason, asking
-for clemency, many in a wild hysteria of fear, and the hideous hate
-that is born of fear, begging the governor to let “justice” take its
-course.
-
-There were the names of many prominent men and women signed to these
-communications; among them was a request signed by many authors in
-England requesting clemency, but there was no appeal stronger, and no
-protest braver, than that in the letter which Mr. Howells had written
-to a New York newspaper analyzing the case and showing the amazing
-injustice of the whole proceeding. Mr. Howells had first gone, so
-he told me in after years, to the aged poet Whittier, whose gentle
-philosophy might have moved him to a mood against that public wrong,
-and then to George William Curtis, but they had advised him to write
-the protest himself, and he had done so, and he had done it better
-and more bravely than either of them could have done out of the great
-conscience and the great heart that have always been on the side of
-the weak and the oppressed, with a mercy which when it is practised
-by mankind is always so much nearer the right and the divine than our
-crude and generally cruel attempts at justice can ever be.
-
-But all these prayers had fallen on official ears that--to use a
-grotesque figure--were so closely pressed to the ground that they could
-not hear; and there was nothing to do, since they were so many and so
-bulky that no latest-improved and patented steel filing-case could hold
-them, but to have a big box made and lock them up in that for all time,
-forgotten, like so many other records of injustice, out of the minds of
-men.
-
-But not entirely; injustice was never for long out of the mind of John
-P. Altgeld, and during all those first months of his administration he
-had been brooding over this notable instance of injustice, and he had
-come to his decision. He knew the cost to him; he had just come to the
-governorship of his state, and to the leadership of his party, after
-its thirty years of defeat, and he realized what powerful interests
-would be frightened and offended if he were to turn three forgotten men
-out of prison; he understood how partizanship would turn the action to
-its advantage.
-
-It mattered not that most of the thoughtful men in Illinois would tell
-you that the “anarchists” had been improperly convicted, that they
-were not only entirely innocent of the murder of which they had been
-accused, but were not even anarchists; it was simply that the mob had
-convicted them in one of the strangest frenzies of fear that ever
-distracted a whole community, a case which all the psychologists of all
-the universities in the world might have tried, without getting at the
-truth of it--much less a jury in a criminal court.
-
-And so, one morning in June, very early, I was called to the governor’s
-office, and told to make out pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab.
-“And do it yourself,” said the governor’s secretary, “and don’t say
-anything about it to anybody.”
-
-I cannot tell in what surprise, in what a haze, or with what emotions
-I went about that task. I got the blanks and the records, and, before
-the executive clerk, whose work it was, had come down, I made out those
-three pardons, in the largest, roundest hand I could command, impressed
-them with the Great Seal of State, had the secretary of state sign
-them, and took them over to the governor’s office. I was admitted to
-his private room, and there he sat, at his great flat desk. The only
-other person in the room was Dreier, a Chicago banker, who had never
-wearied, it seems, in his efforts to have those men pardoned. He was
-standing, and was very nervous; the moment evidently meant much to him.
-The Governor took the big sheets of imitation parchment, glanced over
-them, signed his name to each, laid down the pen, and handed the papers
-across the table to Dreier. The banker took them, and began to say
-something. But he only got as far as----
-
-“Governor, I hardly”--when he broke down and wept. Altgeld made an
-impatient gesture; he was gazing out of the window in silence, on the
-elm-trees in the yard. He took out his watch, told Dreier he would miss
-his train--Dreier was to take the Alton to Joliet, deliver the pardons
-to the men in person, and go on into Chicago with them that night--and
-Dreier nervously rolled up the pardons, took up a little valise, shook
-hands, and was gone.
-
-On the table was a high pile of proofs of the document in which
-Governor Altgeld gave the reasons for his action. It was an able paper;
-one might well rank it among state papers, and I suppose no one now, in
-these days, when so many of Altgeld’s democratic theories are popular,
-would deny that his grounds were just and reasonable, or that he had
-done what he could to right a great wrong; though he would regret that
-so great a soul should have permitted itself to mar the document by
-expressions of hatred of the judge who tried the case. But perhaps it
-is not so easy to be calm and impersonal in the midst of the moving
-event, as it is given to others to be long afterward.
-
-But whatever feelings he may have had, he was calm and serene ever
-after. I saw him as I was walking down to the Capitol the next morning.
-It was another of those June days which now and then are so perfect
-on the prairies. The Governor was riding his horse--he was a gallant
-horseman--and he bowed and smiled that faint, wan smile of his, and
-drew up to the curb a moment. There was, of course, but one subject
-then, and I said:
-
-“Well, the storm will break now.”
-
-“Oh, yes,” he replied, with a not wholly convincing air of throwing off
-a care, “I was prepared for that. It was merely doing right.”
-
-I said something to him then to express my satisfaction in the great
-deed that was to be so wilfully, recklessly, and cruelly misunderstood.
-I did not say all I might have said, for I felt that my opinions could
-mean so little to him. I have wished since that I had said more,--said
-something, if that might have been my good fortune, that could perhaps
-have made a great burden a little easier for that brave and tortured
-soul. But he rode away with that wan, persistent smile. And the storm
-did break, and the abuse it rained upon him broke his heart; but I
-never again heard him mention the anarchist case.
-
-
-
-
-XIV
-
-
-The newspapers were so extravagant in their abuse of Governor Altgeld
-for his pardon of the anarchists that one not knowing the facts might
-have received the impression that the Governor had already pardoned
-most of the prisoners in the penitentiary, and would presently pardon
-those that remained, provided the crimes they had committed, or were
-said to have committed, had been heinous enough. The fact was that he
-issued no more pardons, proportionately at least, than the governors
-who preceded him, since notwithstanding the incessant grinding of
-society’s machinery of vengeance the populations of prisons grow with
-the populations outside of them.
-
-But partizanship was intense in those days; and the fact that Governor
-Altgeld was responsible for such a hegira from the Capitol at
-Springfield as Colonel McKenzie had longed to behold in the Capitol
-at Frankfort exacerbated the bitter feeling. The sentiment thus
-created, however, did increase the hopes of convicts, and the Governor
-was continually importuned by their friends--those of them that had
-friends, which was apt to be a pitifully small percentage of the whole
-number--to give them back their liberty. A few weeks after the pardons
-had been issued to the anarchists, George Brennan of Braidwood, then a
-clerk in the State House, told me a moving story of a young man of his
-acquaintance, who was then confined in the penitentiary at Joliet. The
-young man was dying of tuberculosis, and his mother, having no other
-hope than that he might be released to die at home, had made her appeal
-to Brennan, and he had seen to the filing of an application in due
-form, and now he asked me if I would not call the Governor’s attention
-to it. I got out the great blue envelope containing the thin papers in
-the case--they were as few as the young man’s friends--and took them
-over to the Governor, but no sooner had I laid them on his desk and
-made the first hesitating and tentative approach to the subject, than I
-divined the moment to be wholly inauspicious. The Governor did not even
-look at the papers, he did not even touch the big blue linen envelope,
-but shook his head and said:
-
-“No, no, I will not pardon any more. The people are opposed to it; they
-do not believe in mercy; they love revenge; they want the prisoners
-punished to the bitterest extremity.”
-
-I did not then know how right he was in his cynical generalization,
-though I did know that his decision was so far from his own heart
-that it was no decision at all, but merely the natural human reaction
-against all the venom that had been voided upon him, and I went away
-then, and told Brennan that we must wait until the Governor was in
-another mood.
-
-Three or four days afterward I met the Governor one morning as he
-was passing through the rotunda of the State House, his head bent
-in habitual abstraction, and seeing me in what seemed always some
-subconscious way he stopped and said:
-
-“Oh, by the way: that pardon case you spoke of the other morning--I
-was somewhat hasty I fear, and out of humor. If you’ll get the papers
-I’ll see what can be done.”
-
-I knew of course what could be done, and knew then that it would be
-done, and I made haste to get the papers, which had been kept on my
-desk awaiting that propitious season which I had the faith to feel
-would come sooner or later, though I had not expected it to come quite
-so soon as that. I already anticipated the gladness that would light up
-Brennan’s good Irish face when I handed him the pardon for his friend,
-and I could dramatize the scene in that miner’s cottage in Braidwood
-when the pardoned boy flew to his mother’s arms. I intended to say
-nothing then to Brennan, however, but to wait until the pardon, signed
-and sealed, could be delivered into his hands, but as I was going
-across the hall to the Governor’s chambers I encountered Brennan, and
-then of course could not hold back the good news. And so I told him,
-looking into his blue eyes to behold the first ripple of the smile
-I expected to see spread over his face; but there was no smile. He
-regarded me quite soberly, shook his head, and said:
-
-“It’s too late now.”
-
-And he drew from his pocket a telegram, and, without any need to read
-it, said:
-
-“He died last night.”
-
-I took the papers back and had them filed away among those cases that
-had been finally disposed of, though that formality could not dispose
-of the case for me. The Governor was waiting for the papers, and at
-last when the morning had almost worn away I went over to his chambers
-to add another fardel to that heavy load which I had thought it was to
-be my lot that day to see lightened in the doing of an act of grace and
-pity. I told him as he sat alone at his desk, and the shade of sorrow
-deepened a moment on his pale face; but he said nothing, and I was glad
-to go.
-
-The poor little tragedy had its impressions for me, and it was not
-long until I thought I saw in it the motive of a story, which at once
-I began to write. The theme was the embarrassment which a governor’s
-conscience created for him because during a critical campaign he knew
-it to be his duty to pardon a notorious convict,--and I invented the
-situations and expedients to bear the tale along to that thrilling
-climax in which the governor was delivered out of his difficulty by
-the most opportune death of the convict, whom a higher hand could
-dramatically be said to have pardoned. I worked very hard on the story,
-and thought it pretty fine, and I sent it away at last to an eastern
-magazine. And then I waited, and at length a letter came saying that
-the story was well enough thought of in that editorial room to hold
-it until the editor-in-chief should return from Europe and hand down
-a final decision. I waited for weeks, and then one morning there on
-my desk was an envelope, ominous in its bigness; it was one of those
-letters you do not have to open in order to read them, because you
-know what they say; I knew my manuscript had come back. But when I
-opened the package, instead of the familiar slip of rejection, there
-was a letter; the editor liked the story, saw much in it, he said,
-but felt--and quite rightly I am sure--that its ending, with the
-convict dying in the very nick of time to save the governor from his
-embarrassment, was an evasion of the whole moral issue; besides, the
-conclusion was too melodramatic,--that was the word he used,--and would
-I change it?
-
-The day after all was bright and cheerful; I remember it well, the
-sun lying on the State House lawns, their green dotted with the gold
-of dandelions, and the trees twisting their leaves almost rapturously
-in a sparkling air we did not often breathe on those humid prairies.
-And--though this has nothing whatever to do with the case, and enters
-it only as one of those incidents that linger in the memory--William
-Jennings Bryan was there that day, calling on the Governor and the
-Secretary of State. He was then a young congressman from Nebraska, and
-he made a speech; but I was interested in the story far more than in
-politics or any speech about it, even the brilliant speech of a man
-who so soon, and with such remarkable _élan_, was to charge across the
-country on the hosts of privilege.
-
-And I changed the story; I made that poor harried governor drain
-his bitter cup of duty to the lees, and gave the story an ending
-so remorselessly logical, so true to the facts and fates of human
-experience, that it might have been as depressing as one of Hardy’s
-“Little Ironies”--could it have resembled them in any other way,
-which of course it could not, unless it were in that imitation with
-which the last author I had been reading was pretty sure though all
-unconsciously to be flattered. I changed the story, and sent the MS.
-back to the waiting editor; and it was returned as the string snaps
-back to the bow, with a letter that showed plainly that his interest in
-the tale had all evaporated. He had no regrets, it appeared, save one
-perhaps, since he concluded his letter by saying:
-
-“Besides, you have destroyed the fine dramatic ending which the story
-possessed in its first draft.”
-
-The experience uprooted another of society’s oak-trees for me, and
-it has continued to lie there, with the roots of its infallibility
-withering whitely in the air, though humanity still somehow continues
-to arrange itself about the institution as best it can. This process
-of uprooting, I suppose, goes on in life to the very end; but it is
-wholesome after all, since life grows somehow easier after one has
-learned that human beings are all pretty human and pretty much alike
-in their humanness, and the great service of literature to mankind has
-been, and more and more will be, I hope, to teach human beings this
-salutary and consoling lesson.
-
-But, in no way despairing, I kept the manuscript by me, and when I
-was not trying to write other stories I was retouching it, until in
-the end its fate was almost that of the portrait which the artist in
-one of Balzac’s stories kept on trying to improve until it was but
-a meaningless scumble of gray, with no likeness to anything in this
-universe. Its fate was not quite that bad, however, since it made for
-me a friend.
-
-
-
-
-XV
-
-
-The incident, like that on which the story itself was founded, occurred
-in the course of another effort to induce the Governor to save a poor
-wretch from the gallows. The autumn preceding, just when the World’s
-Fair at Chicago was at its apogee, a half-crazed boy had assassinated
-Carter Harrison, the old mayor of that city, and had been promptly
-tried and condemned to death. The time for the execution of the
-sentence drew on, and two or three days before the black event I had a
-telegram from Peter Dunne and other newspaper friends in Chicago asking
-me to urge the governor, or the acting governor as it happened at that
-time to be, to commute the sentence to one of imprisonment for life.
-The boy, so the telegrams said, was clearly insane, and had been at the
-time of his crazy and desperate deed; his case had not been presented
-with the skill that might have saved him, or at least might have saved
-another in such a plight; there had been the customary hue and cry, the
-most cherished process of the English law, “and,” Dunne concluded, “do
-get Joe Gill to let him off.”
-
-Joe Gill was Joseph B. Gill, the young Lieutenant-Governor of the
-state, and because Governor Altgeld was just then out of the state he
-was on the bridge as acting governor. Gill had been one of the Immortal
-101, and as a representative had made a record in support of certain
-humane measures in behalf of the miners of the state. The newspaper
-correspondents had had pleasure in celebrating him and his work in
-their despatches, and because of his popularity among the miners, to
-say nothing of his popularity among the newspaper men, he had been
-nominated for lieutenant-governor on the ticket with Altgeld. There was
-in our relations a _camaraderie_ which put any thought of presumption
-out of the question; besides, I was always so much opposed to the
-killing of human beings, especially to that peculiarly horrible form of
-killing which the state deliberately and in cold blood commits under
-the euphemism of “capital punishment,” that I was always ready to ask
-any governor to commute a sentence of death that had been pronounced
-against anybody; so that it seemed a simple matter to ask Joe Gill,
-himself the heart of kindness, to save the life of this boy whose soul
-had wandered so desperately astray in the clouds which darkened it.
-
-Early the next morning--the telegrams had come at night--I went over
-to the governor’s office, and the governor’s private secretary told
-me that Lieutenant-Governor Gill had not yet appeared, and as a good
-secretary, anxious to protect his chief, he asked:
-
-“What do you want to see him about?”
-
-“This Prendergast they’re going to hang in Chicago next Friday.”
-
-At this a man sitting in the room near the secretary’s desk looked up
-with a sudden access of intense interest; and, starting from his chair
-and transfixing me with a sharp glance, he asked:
-
-“What interest have you in the Prendergast case?”
-
-“None,” I said, “except that I don’t want to have him, or anybody,
-hanged.”
-
-On the man’s face, tired, with the expression of world-weariness life
-gives to the countenance behind which there has been too much serious
-contemplation of life, a face that seemed prematurely wrinkled, there
-suddenly appeared a smile as winning as a woman’s, and he said in a
-voice that had the timbre of human sympathy and the humor of a peculiar
-drawl:
-
-“Well, you’re all right, then.”
-
-It thereupon occurred to the governor’s secretary to introduce us, and
-so I made the acquaintance of Clarence Darrow. He had taken it upon
-himself to neglect his duties as the attorney of some of the railroads
-and other large corporations in Chicago long enough to come down to
-Springfield on his own initiative and responsibility to plead with the
-Governor for this lad’s life (he was always going on some such Quixotic
-errand of mercy for the poor and the friendless), and we retired to the
-governor’s ante-chamber to await the coming of Gill. We talked for a
-while about the Prendergast case, which might have had more sympathetic
-consideration had it not persisted as the Carter Harrison case in
-the mind of that public, which when its latent spirit of vengeance
-is aroused can so easily become the mob, but it was not long until I
-discovered that Darrow had read books other than those of the law,
-and for an hour we talked of Tolstoy and the other great Russians,
-and of Thomas Hardy and of Mr. Howells, to enumerate no more of the
-long catalogue of those realists whom we liked in common, and when I
-discovered that he actually knew Mr. Howells, knew him personally, as
-the saying is, I could feel that poor Prendergast, though I had never
-seen him in my life, or scarcely ever thought of him until the night
-before, had done me one service at least, and it made me all the more
-anxious to save him.
-
-When Joe Gill’s tall Egyptian form came swinging into the room our
-talk of books was interrupted long enough to arrange for a hearing
-that afternoon, and then we resumed our talk, and it endured through
-luncheon and after, and I left him only long enough to have a
-conversation with Gill and to ask him as a sort of personal favor to an
-old friend to spare the boy’s life.
-
-At two o’clock the hearing was called. The reporters and the governor’s
-secretary and George Brennan and I made the audience, and Gill sat
-up erectly in the governor’s chair to hear the appeal. Darrow asked
-me the proper address for a governor, and I said since this was the
-lieutenant-governor I thought “Your Excellency” would be propitiative,
-and Darrow made one of those eloquent appeals for mercy of which he
-is the complete master. It moved us all, but the Lieutenant-Governor
-gathered himself together and refused it, and Darrow went back to
-Chicago to unfold those legal technicalities which make our law
-so superior to other forms in that they can stay the hand of its
-vengeance. He did not succeed in the end, and the boy was hanged, and
-murder has gone on in Chicago since, I understand, the same as before.
-But Darrow could not leave Springfield until midnight of that day, and
-we talked about books all the evening, and when he boarded his train
-he had in his valise the MS. of my story about another governor and
-another pardon, concerning which he was charged to answer a certain
-question to which all my doubts and perplexities could be reduced,
-namely: “Is it worth while, and if not, is there any use in going on
-and trying to write one that is?”
-
-I had to wait almost as long for his decision as though he had been an
-editor himself, but when I called at his office in Chicago one morning
-in the autumn to get the MS., and he told me that his answer to my
-question was “yes,” and that he would, if I agreed, send the story to
-Mr. Howells, I was as happy as though he had been an editor and had
-accepted it for publication. I could not agree to its being sent on to
-weary Mr. Howells, but took it back with me to Springfield, in hope, if
-not in confidence.
-
-
-
-
-XVI
-
-
-However, it has seemed to be my fate, or my weakness, which we too
-often confuse with fate, to vacillate between an interest in letters
-and an interest in politics, and after that year, whose days and nights
-were almost wholly given to studying law, I was admitted to the bar,
-and thereupon felt qualified to go out on the stump in the campaign
-that autumn and speak in behalf of the Democratic ticket. It was fun to
-drive out over Sangamon County in those soft autumn evenings, over the
-soft roads,--though if it rained they became too soft,--and to speak
-in schoolhouses to the little audiences of farmers, or of miners, on
-the iniquities of the tariff. If we had been a little more devoted to
-principle, perhaps, than we were to party, we might better have spoken
-of the iniquities of that Democratic minority in the Senate which had
-just completed its betrayal of us all and helped to perpetrate those
-iniquities, but when you belong to a party you are presumed to adjust
-yourself to what your representatives do, and to make the best of what
-generally is a pretty bad bargain. The bargain of those senators had
-been particularly bad, and so, instead of speaking in the tones of
-righteous indignation, we had to adopt the milder accents of apology
-and explanation, and it was difficult to explain to some of those
-audiences. There was more or less heckling, and now and then impromptu
-little debates, and sometimes when the meeting was done, and we started
-on the long ride back to town, we would find that the nuts had been
-removed from the axles of our carriage-wheels. Perhaps that argument
-was as good as any we had made, and it could not matter much anyway,
-since partizan speeches never convince anybody, and if they could,
-if they could do anything but deepen and intensify prejudice, whole
-batteries of the world’s best orators in that year could not have
-overcome the vicious effects of that high betrayal, even though they
-had been led to the charge by Phocion and Demosthenes.
-
-I suppose no greater moral wrong was ever committed in America. It
-had been bad enough that a policy of favoritism and advantage which
-appealed to so many because of the good luck of its reassuring name,
-had endured so long, as a sort of necessity in the development of a new
-continent; it had been bad enough that labor had first been lied to and
-then subjugated by the lie, that women had been driven into mills, and
-children had been fed to the Moloch of the machines, and that on these
-sacrifices there had been reared in America an insolent plutocracy with
-the ideals of a gambler and the manners of a wine-agent. But when the
-workingmen had learned at last that the system did not “protect” them,
-and when thousands of young men in the land, filled with the idealism
-of youth, had recognized the lie and the hypocrisy, and hated them with
-a fine moral abhorrence, and had turned to the Democratic party and
-trusted it to redeem its promise to reform this evil, and had put it in
-power in the nation, only to have its leaders in the Senate betray them
-with the brutal cynicism such a cause as theirs demands, then there was
-committed a deed little short of dastardly. If that seems too strong
-a word, the deed was surely contemptible, and base enough to fill
-anyone with despair of the party and of the party system as it had been
-developed in America, though it has been understood by only two men
-so far as I know--M. Ostrogorski and Golden Rule Jones. It was enough
-to disgust anyone with politics altogether, and to forswear them and
-parties, too, although I never quite understood the philosophy of the
-attitude until, a few years later, Golden Rule Jones made it clear. He
-made many things clear, for he dropped the plummet of his original mind
-down, down, down, more profoundly into fundamental life than anyone I
-can think of.
-
-To me, in those days, the tariff question had seemed entirely
-fundamental. I used to think that if we could but have civil-service
-reform, and tariff for revenue only, the world would go very well.
-The tariff question is not considered fundamental in these days, of
-course, so fast and so far past the Mugwumps has the world run, though
-everybody realizes its evil, and knows, or should know, that the notion
-of privilege on which tariffs are founded is quite fundamentally wrong,
-and every political party promises to reduce its rates, or revise them,
-or at least to take some measures against the lie.
-
-The Democratic party, to be sure, redeemed itself later under the
-splendid leadership of President Wilson, but at that time, while we
-recognized the evil of the theory, we seemed to have sunk into a
-sordid acquiescence in the fact; everybody thought the tariff wrong,
-but nobody wished to have it done away with so long as there was a
-chance, to speak in modern American, for him to get in on the graft.
-The word “graft” was unknown in those days, by all save those thieves
-in whose argot it was found and devoted to its present general use in
-the vocabulary. I suppose it is in the dictionary by this time. In any
-event, it is not strange that the word should have become so current,
-since for a while we made a national institution of the very thing it
-connotes.
-
-There was, however, then and always, the labor question, and we were
-beginning to discover that that is fundamental, perhaps the one great
-fundamental,--aside from the complication of evil and good that is
-inherent and implicit in humanity itself,--since the burning question
-is and always will be how the work of the world is to be got done, and,
-what is a much more embarrassing problem, who is to do it. Many of the
-men who had been doing that work, or the heaviest of it, were striking
-in Illinois in those years.
-
-The shots the Pinkertons had fired at Homestead echoed in the state;
-Senator Palmer had made a great speech about it in the Senate; and
-perhaps the tariff had something to do with that, since tariffs on
-steel have not been unknown. But there were shots fired nearer home,
-first in the strike among the men who were digging the drainage canal,
-then among the miners in the soft coal fields of the state, then the
-strike in the model town of Pullman, and the great railroad strike that
-grew out of it.
-
-They called it the Debs Rebellion, and for a while it assumed some of
-the proportions of a rebellion, or at least it frightened many people
-in Illinois as much as a rebellion might have done. We were in the
-midst of all its alarms during that whole spring and summer, and down
-in the adjutant-general’s office at the State House there was the stir
-almost of war itself, with troops being ordered here and there about
-the state, and the Governor harried and worried by a situation that
-presented to him the abhorrent necessity of using armed force. I was
-reading over the other day the report made to the War Department by
-my friend Major Jewett Baker, then a lieutenant in the Twelfth U. S.
-Infantry, detailed with the National Guard of Illinois; and in his
-clear and excellent account of all those confused events the scenes of
-those times came back: the long lines of idle freight cars, charred
-by incendiary flames; the little groups of men standing about wearing
-the white ribbons of the strike sympathizers, and the colonel of the
-regular army, in his cups at his club, who wished he might order a
-whole regiment to shoot them, “each man to take aim at a dirty white
-ribbon”; the regulars encamped on the lake front, their sentinels
-pacing their posts at the quickstep in the rain; and then that morning
-conference in the mayor’s office in Chicago, at which I was permitted
-to look on--what an interesting life it is to look on at!--when there
-appeared Eugene V. Debs, tall, lithe, nervous, leader of the strikers,
-his hair, what there was of it, sandy, but his head mostly bald, his
-eyes flashing, his mouth ready to smile, soon to go to Woodstock Jail,
-to emerge a Socialist, and become the leader of that party.
-
-Major Baker’s report shows, indirectly and by inference, that much of
-the criticism which the Governor endured was not justified, since he
-turned out all his troops as fast as local authorities asked for them.
-At any rate, he acted according to his democratic principles and to his
-conception of his duty. His principles were in a sense different from
-those of President Cleveland, with whom he disagreed in that notable
-instance when the President in his vigorous, practical way sent federal
-troops into Chicago; the Governor protested, as one of his predecessors
-in the governor’s office, Senator Palmer, had protested when President
-Grant sent federal troops under Phil Sheridan into Chicago at the time
-of the great fire. Almost everybody who had any way of making his voice
-heard sided with President Cleveland, and the end of the strike was
-accredited to him. Doubtless the grim presence of those regular troops
-did overawe the hoodlums who had taken advantage of the strike to
-create disorder, but if the credit must go to armed force, the report
-by Major, or, as he was in those days, Lieutenant, Baker shows that
-that little company of the Illinois National Guard which ruthlessly
-fired into the mob at Loomis Street one night virtually ended the
-disorder.
-
-Perhaps Governor Altgeld was willing to forego any “credit” for an act,
-which, however necessary to the preservation of order, demanded so many
-lives. I do not know as to that, but I do recall the expression which
-clouded his face that afternoon we arrived at Lemont, during the strike
-at the drainage canal. It occurred a year before the railway strike,
-and the Governor had gone to Lemont himself to make an investigation.
-He had asked Lieutenant Baker and me to go with him, and when we got
-off the train at Lemont, on the afternoon of a cheerless day, the
-crowds were standing aimlessly about, watching with a sullen curiosity
-the arrival of the militia. The soldiers were just then going into
-camp on the level rocks by a bridge across the canal and the Desplaines
-River--the bridge, according to the military scientists, was, I
-believe, considered, for some mysterious reason, to be a strategic
-point.
-
-The picture was one for the brush of Remington--those young blue-clad
-soldiers (it was before the days of our imperialism, and of the khaki
-our soldiers now imitate the British in wearing)--and Baker and I stood
-and gazed at it a moment, affected by the fascination there always is
-in the superficial military spectacle; and then, suddenly, we were
-aware that there was another and more dramatic point of interest,
-where a group stood about the body of a workman who had been shot in
-the riots of that morning. He was a foreigner, the clothes he wore
-doubtless those he had had on when he passed under the Statue of
-Liberty, coming to this land with what hopes of freedom in his breast
-no one can ever know. The wife who had come with him was on her knees
-beside him, rocking back and forth in her grief, dumb as to any words
-in a strange land whose tongue she could not speak or understand.
-
-The reporters from the Chicago newspapers were there, and among them
-Eddie Bernard, an old Whitechapeler, who told us that the man had
-reached Lemont only a few days before, and had been happy in the job
-he had so promptly found in the new land of promise. And now, there he
-lay, shot dead. Bernard looked a moment, and then in the irony of a
-single phrase he expressed the whole drama as he said:
-
-“The land of the free and the home of the brave!”
-
-That was fundamental, anyhow, and politics were not going deeply into
-the question, except as such men as Altgeld did so, and even they were
-criticized sharply for attempting it. And one might well be disgusted
-with politics, then and always, and think of something that has the
-consolation of literature. The traffic of politicians, as Mr. George
-Moore somewhere says, is with the things of this world, while art is
-concerned with the dreams, the visions and the aspirations of a world
-beyond this. Though literature must some day in this land concern
-itself with that very question of labor, since it is with fundamental
-life that art must deal, and be true in its dealing.
-
-
-
-
-XVII
-
-
-Politics in those days--and not alone in those days either--were mean,
-and while I do not intend to say that this meanness bowed me with
-despair, it did fill me with disgust, and made the whole business
-utterly distasteful. Politics were almost wholly personal, there was
-then no conception of them as related to social life. An awakening was
-coming, to be sure, and the signs were then apparent, even if but few
-saw them. They were to most quite dim; but there were here and there in
-the land dreamers of a sort, who had caught a new vision. The feeling
-of it, the emotion, was to find expression in Mr. Bryan’s great
-campaign in 1896; but there was then in Chicago a little group, men who
-had read Henry George, or, without reading him, had looked out on life
-intelligently and gained a concept of it, or perhaps had merely felt
-in themselves the stirrings of a new social instinct, and these saw,
-or thought they saw, the way to a better social order. They could not
-in those days gain so patient a hearing for their views as they have
-since, if any hearing they have had may after all be called patient;
-they were not so very patient themselves, perhaps, as men are quite apt
-not to be when they think they see as clearly as though a perpetual
-lightning blazed in the sky exactly what is the matter with the world,
-and have a simple formula, which, were it but tried, would instantly
-and infallibly make everything all right.
-
-But these men were not in politics; some of them were too impractical
-ever to be, and the only man in politics who understood them at all
-was Altgeld. Generally, the moral atmosphere of politics was foul and
-heavy with the feculence of all the debauchery that is inseparable
-from privilege. The personnel of politics was generally low; and in
-city councils and state legislatures there was a cynical contempt of
-all the finer sentiments. It was not alone that provincialism and
-philistinism which stand so obdurately and with such bovine stupidity
-in the way of progress; there was a positive scorn of the virtues,
-and the alliance between the lobbyists and the lawyers of the great
-corporation interests on the one hand, and the managers of both the
-great political parties on the other, was a fact, the worst feature of
-which was that no one seemed to care, or if a few did care, they did
-not know what to do about it. It was a joke among the newspaper men,
-who had little respect for the men who filled the positions of power
-and responsibility; the wonder was, indeed, after such association,
-that they had any respect left for anything in the world. Only the
-other day, reading Walt Whitman’s terrific arraignment of the powers
-that were in control of the government of the nation in Buchanan’s
-time, his awful catalogue of the sorts of men who composed the
-directorate of affairs,--it may be read in his prose works by those
-who wish,--I was struck by the similarity in this respect of that time
-with that which immediately preceded the newer and better time of the
-moral awakening in America. Altgeld was one of the forerunners of this
-time; and, in accordance with the universal law of human nature, it was
-his fate to be misunderstood and ridiculed and hated, even by many in
-his own party. He was far in the van in most ways, so far that it was
-impossible for his own party to follow him. It did not follow him in
-his opposition to a bill which was passed in the General Assembly to
-permit of the consolidation of gas companies in Chicago; the machines
-of the two parties were working well together in the legislature--in
-one of those bipartizan alliances which were not to be understood until
-many years later, and even then not to be understood so very clearly,
-since most of our cities have been governed since by such alliances,
-in the interest of similar gas companies and other public utility
-corporations--and when the Governor vetoed their evil measure, this
-same bipartizan machine sought to pass it over his veto, and none was
-more active in the effort than were the leaders of his own party in the
-House.
-
-The supreme effort was made on the last night of the session, amidst
-one of those riots which mark the dissolution of our deliberative
-legislative bodies. The lobbyists for the measure were quite shameless
-that night, as they were on most nights, no doubt; almost as shameless
-as the legislators themselves. The House was in its shirt-sleeves; and
-there was the rude horse-play of country bumpkins; paper wads were
-flying, now and then some member sent hurtling through the hot air
-his file of printed legislative bills, and all the while there was
-that confusion of sound, laughter, and oaths and snatches of song,
-a sort of bedlam, in which laws were being enacted--laws that must
-be respected and even revered, because of their sacred origin. The
-leaders were serious, but worried; the expressions of their drawn,
-tense, nervous faces were unhappy in suspicion and fear, and, perhaps,
-because of uneasy consciences. The speaker sat above them, pale and
-haggard, rapping his splintered sounding-board with a broken gavel,
-rapping persistently and futilely. And as the time drew near when the
-gas bill was to come on for consideration, the nervous tension was
-intensified, and evil hung almost palpably in the hot, close air of
-that chamber. Those who have had experience of legislative bodies, and
-have by practice learned something of political aëroscopy, can always
-tell when “something is coming off”; political correspondents have
-cultivated the sense, and that night they could have divined nothing
-good or pure or beautiful in that chamber (where the portraits of
-Lincoln and of Douglas hung), unless it were the mellow music, now and
-then, of the glass prisms of the chandeliers hanging high from the
-garish ceiling, as they tinkled and chimed whenever some little breeze
-wandered in from the June night.
-
-And yet there was beauty there, moral beauty, as there ever is
-somewhere in man. Out on the edge of that bedlam, standing under the
-gallery on the Democratic side, near the cloak-room, stood a tall, lank
-man. You would have known him at once, anywhere, as an Egyptian, as we
-called those who had come from the Illinois land south of the old O. &
-M. railroad. He was uncouth in appearance; he wore drab, ill-fitting
-clothes, and at his wrinkled throat there was no collar. He was a
-member, sent there from some rural district far down in the southern
-end of the state; and all through the session he had been silent,
-taking no part, except to vote, and to vote, on most occasions, with
-his party, which, in those days, was the whole duty of man. This night
-would see the end of his political career, if his brief experience
-in an obscure position could be called a career, and he stood there,
-silently looking on, plucking now and then at his chin, his long,
-wrinkled face brown and solemn and inscrutable.
-
-The old Egyptian stood there while the long roll was being called, and
-the crisis approached, and the nervous tension was a keen pain. And
-suddenly one of the gas lobbyists went up to him, there on the verge
-of the House, and began to talk with him. I had the story a good while
-afterwards from one of the whips, who, it seemed, knew all that had
-gone on that night. The lobbyist of course knew about the man, knew
-especially about his necessities, as lobbyists do; and he began to
-talk to the old fellow about them--about his poverty and his children,
-and he used the old argument which has been employed so long and so
-successfully with the rural members of all our legislatures, and has
-been the source of so much evil in our city governments, that is, the
-argument that the bill concerned only Chicago, and that the folks down
-home would neither know nor care how he voted on it, and then--how
-much two thousand dollars would mean to him. As the lobbyist talked,
-there were various eyes that looked at him, waiting for a sign; they
-needed only a few votes then, and the roll-call was being delayed by
-one pretense and another, and the clock on the wall, inexorably ticking
-toward the hour of that legislature’s dissolution, was turned back. The
-old fellow listened and stroked his chin, and then presently, when the
-lobbyist had done, he turned his old blue eyes on him and said:
-
-“I reckon you’re right: I’m poor, and I’ve got a big family. And you’re
-right, too, when you say my people won’t know nor care: they won’t;
-they don’t know nor care a damn; they won’t send me back here, of
-course. And God knows what’s to come of my wife and my children; I am
-going home to them to-morrow and on Monday I’m going to hunt me a job
-in the harvest-field; I reckon I’ll die in the poorhouse. Yes, I’m
-going home--but”--he stopped and looked the lobbyist in the eye--“I’m
-going home an honest man.”
-
-My friend the whip told me the story as a curious and somewhat
-confusing flaw in his theory that every man is for sale,--“most of
-them damned cheap,” he said,--and he thought it might make a plot for
-a story; like many men I have known he was incorrigibly romantic, and
-was always giving me plots for stories. Well, they failed to pass the
-bill over the Governor’s veto, and it was not long until another story
-was pretty well known in Illinois, about that Governor who that night
-was sitting up over in the executive mansion, awaiting the action of
-the general assembly. The story was that a large quantity of the bonds
-of the gas company had been placed at his disposal in a security vault
-in Chicago, in a box to which a man was to deliver him the key; all he
-had to do was to go take the bonds--and permit the bill to become a
-law. His answer, of course, was the veto--an offense as unpardonable
-as the pardoning of the anarchists; and no doubt many such offenses
-against the invisible power in the land were more potent in bringing
-down on his head that awful hatred than his mercy had been--though this
-was made to serve as reason for the hatred. Privilege, of course, hates
-mercy, too.
-
-The old Egyptian went back home, and I have always hoped that he found
-a better job than he went to seek in the harvest-fields, and that he
-did not die at last to the poorhouse; but he was never heard of more,
-and it was not long until the Governor was driven from his office
-amid the hoots and jeers and the hissing of a venomous hatred such as
-nothing but political rancor knows, unless it be religious rancor. Yes,
-politics had got pretty low in those days, and its utter meanness,
-gradually revealed, was enough to cause one to despair of his country
-and his kind. Perhaps the old Egyptian in the legislature and the
-idealist in the governor’s chair should have been enough to keep one
-from despairing altogether, though one honest old peasant cannot save a
-legislature any more than one swallow can make a summer. I do not mean
-to say that he was the only honest man in the legislature: there were
-many others, of course, but partizan politics prevented their honesty
-from being of much avail; or, at any rate, they did not control events.
-With the measurable advance in thought since that time, and the general
-progress of the species, we know now that men do not control events
-half so much as events control men; we do not know exactly what it is
-that does control men--that is, those of us who are not Socialists do
-not know.
-
-Altgeld, at any rate, was disgusted with politics, as well he might
-have been, since they wrecked his fortune and broke his heart. And it
-was with relief, I know, that he said that morning,--almost the last
-he passed in the governor’s chair,--as he and I were going up the long
-walk to the State House steps:
-
-“Well, we’re rid of this, anyway.”
-
-
-
-
-XVIII
-
-
-That peculiar form of human activity, or inactivity, known as getting a
-law practice, has been so abundantly treated on the printed page that
-I have not the temerity to add to the literature on the interesting
-subject. The experience is never dramatic, even if it is sometimes
-tragic, and it is so often tragic that there has seemed no other
-recourse for mankind than, by one of those tacit understandings on
-which our race gets through life, to view it as a comedy. It is no
-comedy, of course, to the chief actor, who is sustained only by his
-dreams, his illusions, and his ideals, and he may count himself
-successful perhaps, if, when he has lost his illusions, he can retain
-at least some of his ideals, though the law is too apt to strip him
-of both. However that may be, in my own experience in that sort there
-was an incident which made its peculiar impressions; indeed, there
-were several such incidents, but the one which I have in mind involves
-the perhaps commonplace story of Maria R----, which ran like a serial
-during those trying years.
-
-I had intended to take up the practice of law in Chicago; I was quite
-certain that there I should set up my little enterprise, and this
-self-same certainty is perhaps the reason why I found myself back in
-Toledo, in a lonely little office in one of the new office buildings;
-sky-scrapers they were called in the new sense of metropolitan life
-that then began to pervade the town; they were not so very high, but
-they seemed high enough to scrape the low skies which arch so many
-of the grey days in the lake region. It was as long ago, I believe,
-as the time of Pythagoras that the law of the certain uncertainty of
-certainty was deduced for the humbling of human pride, and when my
-certainties with regard to Chicago proved all to be broken reeds,
-there were more gray days in that region of the intemperate zone than
-the meteorological records show. The little law office had a portrait
-of William Dean Howells on its walls, and in time the portraits of
-other writers, differing from those other law offices which prefer to
-be adorned with pictures of Chief Justice Marshall--a strong man, of
-course, who wrote some strong fiction, too, in his day--and of Hamilton
-and of Jefferson, indicating either a catholicity or a confusion of
-principle on the part of the occupying proprietor, of which usually he
-is not himself aware. There were a few law-books, too, and on the desk
-a little digest of the law of evidence as affected by the decisions
-of the Ohio courts. I had the noble intention of mastering it, but
-I did not read in it very much, since for a long while there was no
-one to pay me for doing so, and I spent most of my hours at my desk
-over a manuscript of “The 13th District,” a novel of politics I was
-then writing, looking up now and then and gazing out of the window at
-the blank rear walls of certain brick buildings which made a dreary
-prospect, even if one of them did bear, as I well remember, the bright
-and reassuring legend, “Money to Loan at 6 per cent.”
-
-There were not many interruptions at first, but after a while, when I
-had been appointed as attorney to a humane society, there were times
-when I had to lay my manuscripts aside. I felt it to be, in a way, my
-duty to long for such interruptions, but they usually came just at
-those times when I was most absorbed in my manuscript, so that their
-welcome, while affectedly polite, was not wholly from the heart. One
-of these intrusions resulted in a long trial before a justice of the
-peace; it was a case that grew out of a neighborhood quarrel, and all
-the inhabitants of the _locus in quo_ were subpœnaed as witnesses.
-Such a case of course always affords an opportunity to study human
-nature; but this one, too, had the effect ultimately of bringing in
-many clients--and, as Altgeld had said, by way of advice to me, got
-people in the habit of coming to my office. Those witnesses acquired
-that habit, and since human nature seemed to run pretty high in that
-neighborhood most of the time, they got into a good deal of trouble;
-they were most of them so poor that they seldom got into anything else,
-unless it were the jail or the workhouse, and some of them were always
-ready to help send others of them to those places. Out of the long file
-of poor miserable creatures there emerged one day that Maria R---- of
-whom I spoke. She was a buxom young German emigrant, not long over from
-Pomerania, and her fair skin and yellow hair, and a certain manner she
-had, marked her out from all the rest. She came with her children one
-morning to complain of her husband’s neglect of them; and to her, as to
-the whole body of society which thinks no more deeply than she did,
-it seemed the necessary, proper, and even indispensable thing to put
-Rheinhold--that was her husband’s name--in jail (You should have heard
-her speak the name Rheinhold, with that delicious note in which she
-_grasséyéd_ her r’s.) There she sat, on the little chair by the window,
-with her stupidly staring boy and girl at her knees, but in her arms
-the brightest, prettiest, flaxen-haired baby in the world, a little elf
-who was always smiling, and picking at her mother’s nose or cheeks with
-her fat little fingers, and when she smiled, her mother smiled, too; it
-was the only time she ever did.
-
-Rheinhold of course drank; he “mistreated” his children--that is, he
-did not buy them food. And since the Humane Society was organized and
-maintained for the explicit purpose of forcing people to be humane,
-even though it had to be inhumane to accomplish its purpose, the duty
-of its attorney was clear.
-
-Its attorney just then felt in himself a rising indignation, moral of
-course, yet very much like a vulgar anger. To look at those children,
-especially at that baby of which Maria was so fond, much fonder it
-was plain to be seen than of the other two, and to think of a man
-not providing for them, was to have a rage against him, the rage
-which society, so remorselessly moral in the mass, bears against all
-offenders--the rage a good prosecutor must keep alive and flaming in
-his breast if he would nerve himself to his task and earn his fees and
-society’s gratitude. And whom does society reward so lavishly as her
-prosecutors?
-
-However, that is not the strain I would adopt just now. I felt that
-very rage in myself at that moment, and straightway went and had
-Rheinhold arrested and haled before a judge in the Municipal Court,
-charged with the crime of neglecting his children. I can remember
-his wild and bewildered look as he was arraigned that morning. The
-information was read to him, and he moved his head in such instant
-acquiescence that the judge, looking down from his bench, asked him if
-he wished to plead guilty, and he said “Yes.” It seemed then that the
-case was to be quite easily disposed of, and the prosecutor might feel
-gratified by this instant success of his work; and yet Rheinhold stood
-there so confused, so frightened, with the court-room loungers looking
-on, that I said:
-
-“He doesn’t understand a word of all you are saying.”
-
-And so the judge entered a plea of “not guilty.”
-
-I knew a young lawyer with rather large leisure, and I asked him to
-defend Rheinhold. He was glad to do so, and we empaneled a jury and
-went at what Professor Wigmore calls the “high-class sport.” We became
-desperately interested of course, and for days wrangled according to
-the rules of the game over the liberty of the bewildered little German
-who scarcely knew what it was all about. Now and then he made some
-wild, inarticulate protest, but was of course promptly silenced by his
-own lawyer, or by the judge, or by the rules of evidence, which could
-be invoked--with a deep sense of satisfaction when the court ruled
-your way--to prevent him from telling something he had on his mind,
-something that to him seemed entirely exculpatory, something that would
-make the whole clouded situation clear if it could only find its way to
-the light and to the knowledge of mankind.
-
-There was a witness against him, a tall, slender young German
-shoemaker, and it was against him that Rheinhold’s outcries were
-directed. It was not clear just what he was trying to say, and there
-was small disposition to help him make it clear. His lawyer indeed
-seemed embarrassed, as though in making his incoherent interruptions
-Rheinhold were committing a _contretemps_; he must wait for his turn to
-testify, that all might be done in order and according to the ancient
-rules and precedents, and, in a word, as it should be done. Under the
-rules of evidence, of course, Rheinhold could not be allowed to express
-his opinion of the shoemaker; that was not permissible. The court could
-not be concerned with the passions of the human heart; this man before
-the court had a family, and he had neglected to provide food for it,
-and for such a condition it was written and printed in a book that
-the appropriate remedy was a certain number of days or months in the
-workhouse.
-
-And so while Rheinhold silently and philosophically acquiesced, we
-tried him during one whole day, we argued nearly all the next day to
-the jury, and the jury stayed out all that night and in the morning
-returned a verdict of guilty. And Rheinhold was sent to the workhouse
-for nine months.
-
-
-
-
-XIX
-
-
-It was regarded as a triumph for the Humane Society,--the newspapers
-had printed accounts of the trial,--but it was a victory of which I
-felt pretty much ashamed; it all seemed so useless, so absurd, so
-barbarous, when you came to think of it, and what good it had done
-Maria, or anyone, it was difficult to determine. And so, before very
-long, I went to the workhouse board and had Rheinhold paroled, and he
-disappeared, vanished toward the West, and was never heard of more.
-
-Meanwhile Maria lived on in her little house as best she could, and
-with what assistance we could provide her. The Humane Society helped a
-little, and my wife made some clothes for the baby, and a good-natured
-doctor in the neighborhood attended them when they were sick, which was
-a good deal of the time; and Maria seemed happy enough and contented,
-relying with such entire confidence on her friends that one cold night
-she sent for me in great urgency, and when I arrived she pointed to
-the stove, which was smoking and not doing its work in a satisfactory
-manner at all. I mended it and got the fire going, and they managed to
-survive the winter; and when spring came Maria appeared at the office
-and wished to apply to the courts for a divorce. It seemed as good a
-thing to do as any, and the evidence of Rheinhold’s cruel neglect was
-by this time so conclusive that it was not much trouble to obtain a
-decree, especially as the case came before a delightful old bachelor
-judge who felt that if people were not divorced they ought to be; and
-after listening to two of the five or six witnesses I had subpœnaed he
-granted Maria her freedom.
-
-And the next day she got married again. The bridegroom was that very
-shoemaker who had testified in Rheinhold’s trial; he lived not far from
-Maria’s late residence, and the happy event, as I learned then, was the
-culmination of a romance which had disturbed Rheinhold to such a degree
-that he had preferred to be anywhere rather than at home; and it seemed
-now--it was now indeed quite clear--that what he had been trying to
-explain at the time of the trial was that his fate was involved in the
-eternal triangle.
-
-I do not know where Rheinhold is now; as I said, he was never heard
-of more, but I should like to present my apologies to him and to
-inform him that as a result of that expedition into the jungle of the
-law in search of justice I discovered that whatever other men might
-do, I could never again prosecute anyone for anything; and I never
-did. And I think that most of the attempts men make to do justice in
-their criminal courts are about as mistaken, about as absurd, about
-as ridiculous, as that solemn and supremely silly effort we made to
-deal with such a human complication by means of calf-bound law-books,
-and wrangling lawyers, and twelve stupid jurors ranged behind twelve
-spittoons. The whole experience revealed to me the beauty and the
-truth in that wise passage in Mr. Howells’s charming book, “A Boy’s
-Town”:
-
-“In fact, it seems best to be very careful how we try to do justice in
-this world, and mostly to leave retribution of all kinds to God, who
-really knows about things; and content ourselves as much as possible
-with mercy, whose mistakes are not so irreparable.”
-
-That passage, I think, contains a whole and entirely adequate
-philosophy of life; but I suppose that those who shake their heads at
-such heresies will be equally shocked to learn that Maria’s second
-venture proved to be a remarkable success.
-
-The shoemaker was a frugal chap,--the evidence discloses, I think, that
-he had been an unusually frugal lover,--and he had saved some money,
-which, it seems, he was determined not to spend on his fair one until
-he could develop some legal claim to her, but he treated her handsomely
-then, according to his taste and ability. He bought a house in another
-and better part of town, and he furnished it in a way that dazzled
-the eyes of those children who had been accustomed to bare floors and
-had never known the glories of golden oak and blue and yellow and red
-plush, ingrain carpets, and chenille hangings; and he clothed them all
-and sent them to school, and finally they all took his name, and, I
-think, forgot poor Rheinhold altogether. And so, in their new-found
-prosperity, they vanished out of my sight, and I heard of them no more
-for years. Then one day Maria’s little daughter, grown into a tall
-young girl by that time, came to tell me that her mother was dead.
-Maria had started down town with her husband, on Christmas Eve, to buy
-the gifts for her children, and in the heavy snow that was falling a
-defective sidewalk was hidden, and Maria was thrown to the ground and
-so hurt that she died. Her last words to her daughter had been, so the
-girl said, “See Mr. Whitlock; he’ll do what should be done.” Her heirs
-had a clear case against the city, but I had just been elected mayor
-that autumn and could not prosecute such a claim. Another lawyer did
-so, and got damages for the children, and even for the husband, and
-with these funds in a trust company’s keeping the shoemaker educated
-all the children. And he wore about his hat the thickest hand of heavy
-crêpe that I ever saw.
-
-It seemed to annoy, and in some cases even to anger, those whom I
-told of my resolution not to prosecute anyone any more. They would
-argue about it with me as if it made some real difference to them; if
-every lawyer and every man were so to decide, they said, who was to
-proceed against the criminals, who was to do the work of purifying and
-regenerating society? It has always been, of course, a most interesting
-and vital question as to who is to do the dirty work of all kinds in
-this world; but their apprehensions, as I could assure them, were all
-unfounded, since there are always plenty of lawyers, and always plenty
-of them who are not only willing but anxious to act as prosecutors, and
-to put into their work that energy and enthusiasm which the schools of
-efficiency urge upon the youth of the land, and to prosecute with a
-ferocity that could be no more intense if they had suffered some injury
-in their own persons from the accused. And there are even men who are
-willing, for the most meager salaries, to act as guards and wardens
-in prisons, and to do all manner of things, even to commit crimes, or
-at least moral wrongs, in order to put men into prison and keep them
-there, unless they can kill them, and there are plenty who are willing
-to do that, if only society provides them with a rope or a wire to do
-it with.
-
-
-
-
-XX
-
-
-There was, however, in Toledo one man who could sympathize with my
-attitude; and that was a man whose determination to accept literally
-and to try to practice the fundamental philosophy of Christianity
-had so startled and confounded the Christians everywhere that he at
-once became famous throughout Christendom as “Golden Rule Jones.” I
-had known of him only as the eccentric mayor of our city, and nearly
-everyone whom I had met since my advent in Toledo spoke of him only
-to say something disparaging of him. The most charitable thing they
-said was that he was crazy. All the newspapers were against him,
-and all the preachers. My own opinion, of course, could have been
-of no consequence, but I had learned in the case of Altgeld that
-almost universal condemnation of a man is to be examined before it is
-given entire credit. I do not mean to say that there was universal
-condemnation of Golden Rule Jones in Toledo in those days: it was
-simply that the institutional voices of society, the press and the
-pulpit, were thundering in condemnation of him. When the people came to
-vote for his reëlection his majorities were overwhelming, so that he
-used to say that everybody was against him but the people. But that is
-another story.
-
-In those days I had not met him. I might have called at his office, to
-be sure, but I did not care to add to his burdens. One day, suddenly,
-as I was working on a story in my office, in he stepped with a
-startling, abrupt manner, wheeled a chair up to my desk, and sat down.
-He was a big Welshman with a sandy complexion and great hands that
-had worked hard in their time, and he had an eye that looked right
-into the center of your skull. He wore, and all the time he was in the
-room continued to wear, a large cream-colored slouch hat, and he had
-on the flowing cravat which for some inexplicable reason artists and
-social reformers wear; their affinity being due, no doubt, to the fact
-that the reformer must be an artist of a sort, else he could not dream
-his dreams. I was relieved, however, to find that Jones wore his hair
-clipped short, and there was still about him that practical air of the
-very practical business man he had been before he became mayor. He had
-been such a practical business man that he was worth half a million, a
-fairly good fortune for our town; but he had not been in office very
-long before all the business men were down on him, and saying that what
-the town needed was a business man for mayor, a statement that was
-destined to ring in my ears for a good many years. They disliked him of
-course because he would not do just what they told him to,--that being
-the meaning and purpose of a business man for mayor,--but insisted that
-there were certain other people in the city who were entitled to some
-of his service and consideration--namely, the working people and the
-poor. The politicians and the preachers objected to him on the same
-grounds: the unpardonable sin being to express in any but a purely
-ideal and sentimental form sympathy for the workers or the poor. It
-seemed to be particularly exasperating that he was doing all this in
-the name of the Golden Rule, which was for the Sunday-school; and they
-even went so far as to bring to town another Sam Jones, the Reverend
-Sam Jones, to conduct a “revival” and to defeat the Honorable Sam
-Jones. The Reverend Sam Jones had big meetings, and said many clever
-things, and many true ones, the truest among them being his epigram,
-“I am for the Golden Rule myself, up to a certain point, and then I
-want to take the shotgun and the club.” I think that expression marked
-the difference between him and our Sam Jones, in whose philosophy
-there was no place at all for the shotgun or the club. The preachers
-were complaining that Mayor Jones was not using shotguns, or at least
-clubs, on the “bad” people in the town; I suppose that since their own
-persuasions had in a measure failed, they felt that the Mayor with such
-instruments might have made the “bad” people look as if they had been
-converted anyway.
-
-It was when he was undergoing such criticism as this that he came to
-see me, to ask me to speak at Golden Rule Park. This was a bit of green
-grass next to his factory; he had dedicated it to the people’s use,
-and there under a large willow-tree, on Sunday afternoons, he used to
-speak to hundreds. There was a little piano which two men could carry,
-and with that on the platform to play the accompaniments the people
-used to sing songs that Jones had written--some of them of real beauty,
-and breathing the spirit of poetry, if they were not always quite in
-its form. In the winter these meetings were held in Golden Rule Hall,
-a large room that served very well as an auditorium, in his factory
-hard by. On the walls of Golden Rule Hall was the original tin sign
-he had hung up in his factory as the only rule to be known there,
-“Therefore whatsoever things ye would that men should do to you, do ye
-even so to them.” In the course of time every reformer, every radical,
-in the country had spoken in that hall or under that willow-tree,
-and the place developed an atmosphere that was immensely impressive.
-The hall had the portraits of many liberal leaders and humanitarians
-on its walls, and a number of paintings; and in connection with the
-settlement which Jones established across the street the institution
-came to be, as a reporter wrote one day in his newspaper, the center of
-intelligence in Toledo.
-
-Well then, on that morning when first he called, Jones said to me:
-
-“I want you to come out and speak.”
-
-“On what subject?” I asked.
-
-“There’s only one subject,” he said,--“life.” And his face was radiant
-with a really beautiful smile, warmed with his rich humor. I began to
-say that I would prepare something, but he would not let me finish my
-sentence.
-
-“Prepare!” he exclaimed. “Why prepare? Just speak what’s in your heart.”
-
-He was always like that. Once, a good while after, in one of his
-campaigns, he called me on the telephone one evening just at dinner
-time, and said:
-
-“I want you to go to Ironville and speak to-night.”
-
-I was tired, and, as I dislike to confess, somewhat reluctant,--I had
-always to battle so for a little time to write,--so that I hesitated,
-asked questions, told him, as usual, that I had no speech prepared.
-
-“But you know it is written,” he said, “that ‘in that hour it shall be
-given you what ye shall say.’”
-
-I could assure him that the prophecy had somewhat failed in my case,
-and that what was given me to say was not always worth listening to
-when it was said; and then I inquired:
-
-“What kind of crowd will be there?”
-
-“Oh, a good crowd!” he said.
-
-“But what kind of people?”
-
-“What kind of people?” he asked in a tone of great and genuine
-surprise. “What kind of people? Why, there’s only one kind of
-people--just people, just folks.”
-
-I went of course, and I went as well to Golden Rule Park and to Golden
-Rule Hall, and there was never such a school for public speaking as
-that crowded park afforded, with street cars grinding and scraping by
-one side of it and children laughing at their play on the swings and
-poles which Jones had put there for them; or else standing below the
-speaker and looking curiously up into his face, and filling him with
-the fear of treading any moment on their little fingers which, as they
-clung to the edge, made a border all along the front of the platform.
-And for a year or so after his death I spoke there every Sunday: we
-were trying so hard to keep his great work alive.
-
-
-
-
-XXI
-
-
-It was our interest in the disowned, the outcast, the poor, and the
-criminal that drew us first together; that and the fact that we are
-gradually assuming the same attitude toward life. He was full of
-Tolstoy at that time, and we could talk of the great Russian, and I
-could introduce him to the other great Russians. He was then a little
-past fifty, and had just made the astounding discovery that there was
-such a thing as literature in the world: he had been so busy working
-all his life that he had never had time to read, and the whole world of
-letters burst upon his vision all suddenly, and the glorious prospect
-fairly intoxicated him, so that he stood like stout Cortez, though not
-so silent, upon a peak in Darien.
-
-He was reading Mazzini also, and William Morris and Emerson, who
-expressed his philosophy fully, or as fully as one man can express
-anything for another, and it was not long before Jones discovered
-an unusual facility for expressing himself, both with his voice and
-with his pen. The letters he wrote to the men in his shops--putting
-them in their pay-envelopes--are models of simplicity and sincerity,
-which show a genuine culture and have that beauty which is the despair
-of conscious art.[A] He had just learned of Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad
-of Reading Gaol,” and he committed it to memory, or got it into his
-memory somehow, so that he would recite stanzas of it to anyone. He
-read Burns, too, with avidity, and I can see him now standing on the
-platform in one of his meetings, snapping his fingers as he recited:
-
-  A fig for those by law protected!
-  Liberty’s a glorious feast!
-
-But it was Walt Whitman whom he loved most, and his copy of “Leaves of
-Grass” was underscored in heavy lines with a red pencil until nearly
-every striking passage in the whole work had become a rubric. When
-anything struck him, he would have to come and tell me of it; sometimes
-he would not wait, but would call me up on the telephone and read it to
-me. I remember that occasion when his voice, over the wire, said:
-
-“Listen to this [and he read]:
-
-  “The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair, redeeming sins past and to
-    come,
-  Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his
-    brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery.”
-
-Then he laughed, and his chuckle died away on the wire. That expressed
-him; that was exactly what he would have done for a brother, exactly
-what he did do for many a brother, since he regarded all men as his
-brothers, and treated them as such if they would let him. He was always
-going down to the city prisons, or to the workhouses, and talking to
-the poor devils there, quite as if he were one of them, which indeed
-he felt he was, and as all of us are, if we only knew it. And he was
-working all the time to get them out of prison, and finally he and I
-entered into a little compact by which he paid the expenses incident to
-their trials--the fees for stenographers and that sort of thing--if I
-would look after their cases. Hard as the work was, and sad as it was,
-and grievously as my law partners complained of the time it took, and
-of its probable effect on business (since no one wished to be known as
-a criminal lawyer!), it did pay in the satisfaction there was in doing
-a little to comfort and console--and, what was so much more, to compel
-in one city, at least, a discussion of the grounds and the purpose of
-our institutions. For instance, if some poor girl were arrested, and a
-jury trial were demanded for her, and her case were given all the care
-and attention it would have received had she been some wealthy person,
-the police, when they found they could not convict, were apt to be a
-little more careful of the liberties of individuals: they began to have
-a little regard for human rights and for human life.
-
-We completely broke up the old practice of arresting persons “on
-suspicion” and holding them at the will and pleasure of the police
-without any charge having been lodged against them; two or three trials
-before juries, the members of which could very easily be made to see,
-when it was pointed out to them a few times in the course of a three
-days’ trial, that there is nothing more absurd than that policemen
-should make criminals of people merely by suspecting them, and sending
-them to prison on that sole account, wrought a change. It annoyed the
-officials of course, because it interfered with their routine. It was
-no doubt exasperating to be compelled to stay in court two or three
-days and try some wretch according to the forms of law, just as if he
-were somebody of importance and consequence in the world, when they
-would so much rather have been out at the ball-game, or fishing, or
-playing pinochle in the guard-room at police headquarters with the
-detail that had been relieved. Jones managed to get himself fined for
-contempt one day, and he immediately turned the incident to his own
-advantage and made his point by drawing out his check-book with a
-flourish, writing his check for the amount of his fine, and declaring
-that this proved his contention that the only crime our civilization
-punishes is the crime of being poor.
-
-But he was most in his element when the police judge was absent, as
-he was now and then. In that exigency the law gave Jones, as mayor,
-the power to appoint the acting police judge; and when Jones did
-not go down and sit as magistrate himself, he appointed me; and we
-always found some reason or other for letting all the culprits go. The
-foundations of society were shaken of course, and the editorials and
-sermons were heavy with all the predictions of disaster; one might have
-supposed that the whole wonderful and beautiful fabric of civilization
-which man had been so long in rearing was to fall forever into the
-awful abyss because a few miserable outcasts had not been put in
-prison. But nothing happened after all; the poor _misérables_ were back
-again in a few days, and made to resume their hopeless rounds through
-the prison doors; but the policemen of Toledo had their clubs taken
-away from them, and they became human, and learned to help people, and
-not to hurt them if they could avoid it; and that police judge who once
-fined Jones became in time one of the leaders in our city of the new
-social movement that has marked the last decade in America.
-
-I learned to know a good many people in that underworld, many of whom
-were professed criminals, and there were some remarkable characters
-among them. I learned that, just as Jones had said, they were all
-people, just folks, and that they had so much more good than bad in
-them, that if some way could be devised whereby they might have a
-little better opportunity to develop the good, there was hope for all
-of them. Of course, in any effort to help them,--and our efforts were
-not always perhaps wholly wise,--we encountered that most formidable
-and fundamental obstacle to prison reform, the desire in the human
-breast for revenge, the savage hatred which is perhaps some obscure
-instinct of protection against the anti-social members of society: it
-stands forever in the way of all prison reform, and of ameliorations of
-the lot of the poor. It is that which keeps the barbarity of capital
-punishment alive in the world; it is that which makes every prison in
-the land a hell, where from time to time the most revolting atrocities
-are practiced. Out of those experiences, out of the contemplation of
-the misery, the pathos, the hopelessness of the condition of those
-victims, I wrote “The Turn of the Balance.” I was very careful of my
-facts; I was purposely conservative, and, forgetting the advice of
-Goethe, softened things down; as for instance, where I had known of
-cases in which prisoners had been hung up in the bull-rings for thirty
-days,--being lowered to the floor each night of course,--I put it
-down as eight days, and so on. And the wise and virtuous judges and
-the preachers and the respectable people all said it was untrue, that
-such things could not be. Since then there have been investigations of
-prisons in most of the states, with revelations of conditions far worse
-than any I tried to portray. And such things have gone on, and are
-going on to-day; but nobody cares.
-
-
-
-
-XXII
-
-
-And yet somebody after all did care about all those miserable souls
-who are immured in the terrible prisons which society maintains as
-monuments to the strange and implacable hatred in the breast of
-mankind; perhaps, in the last chapter of these vagrant memories, I
-allowed to creep into my utterance some of the old bitterness which
-now and then would taint our efforts, do what we might. And that is
-not at all the note I would adopt, though it used at times to be very
-difficult not to do so; one cannot, day after day, beat against the old
-and solid and impregnable wall of human institutions without becoming
-sore and sick in one’s soul.
-
-And there is no institution which society so cherishes as she does
-her penal institutions, and most sacrosanct of these are the ax, the
-guillotine, the garrote, the gibbet, the electric chair. We tried
-at each session of the legislature to secure the passage of a bill
-abolishing capital punishment, but the good people, those who felt that
-they held in their keeping the morals of the state, always opposed
-it and defeated it. Beloved and sacred institution! No wonder the
-ship-wrecked sailor, cast upon an unknown shore, on looking up and
-beholding a gallows, fell on his knees and said; “Thank God, I’m in a
-Christian land!”
-
-Travelers visit prisons and places of execution, those historic spots
-where humanity made red blots on its pathway in the notion that it was
-doing justice, and always they sigh and shake their heads, beholding
-in those events only a supreme folly and a supreme cruelty.
-
-All the executions, all the imprisonments of the past are seen to
-have been mistakes made by savages; there is not one for which to-day
-a word is uttered in excuse. All the Golgothas of the world have
-become Calvaries, where men go in pity and in tears in the hope that
-their regret may somehow work a retroactive expiation of the guilt of
-their cruel ancestors--and they rise from their knees and go forth
-and acquiesce in brutalities that are to-day different only in the
-slightest of degrees from those they bemoan.
-
-And so all the other executions of death sentences, on subjects less
-distinguished, with no glimmer of the halo of romance, no meed of
-martyrdom to illumine them, are seen to have been huge and grotesque
-mistakes of a humanity that at times gives itself over to the elemental
-savage lust of the blood of its fellows.
-
-I do not say, of course, that there was any similarity between the
-offenses of those whom Jones and I were concerned about in those days
-and those striking figures who illustrate the history of the world
-and mark the slow spiral path of the progress of mankind; these were
-the commonest of common criminals, poor, mistaken, misshapen beings,
-somehow marred in the making.
-
-It was my lot to defend a number of those who had committed murders,
-some of them murders so foul that there was nothing to say in their
-behalf. All one could say was in behalf of those whom one would save
-from committing another murder. But when you have come to know even
-a murderer, when day after day you have visited him in his cell, and
-have talked with him, and have seen him laugh and cry, and have had
-him tell you about his family, and that amazing complexity which he
-calls his life, when gradually you come to know him, no matter how
-undeserving he may be in the abstract, he undergoes a strange and
-subtle metamorphosis; slowly and gradually, without your being aware,
-he ceases to be a murderer, and becomes a human being, very much like
-all those about you. Thus, there is no such thing as a human being in
-the abstract; they are all thoroughly and essentially concrete.
-
-I have wandered far in these speculations, but I hope I have not
-wandered too far to make it clear that Jones’s point of view was always
-and invariably the human point of view; he knew no such thing as
-murderers, or even criminals, or “good” people, or “bad” people, they
-were all to him men and, indeed, brothers. And if society did not care
-about them, except in its desire to make way with them, Jones did care,
-and there were others who cared; the poor cared, the working people
-cared,--though they might themselves at times give way to the same
-elemental social rage,--they always endorsed Jones’s leniency whenever
-they had the opportunity. They had this opportunity at the polls every
-two years, and they never failed him.
-
-They did not fail him even in that last campaign of his, though every
-means known to man was tried to win them away from their peculiar
-allegiance. It was a strange campaign; I suppose there was never
-another like it in America. As I think of it there come back the
-recollections of those raw spring nights; we held our municipal
-elections in the spring in those days, that is, spring as we know
-it in the region of the Great Lakes. It is not so much spring as
-it is a final summing-up and recapitulation of winter, a coda to a
-monstrous meteorological concerto as doleful as the allegro lamentoso
-of Tschaikovsky’s “Sixth Symphony.” There is nowhere in the world, so
-far as I know, or care to know, such an abominable manifestation of the
-meanness of nature; it is meaner than the meanness of human nature,
-entailing a constant struggle with winds, a perpetual bending to gusts
-of snow that is rain, or a rain that is hail, with an east wind that
-blows persistently off Lake Erie for two months, with little stinging
-barbs of ice on its breath--and then, suddenly, it is summer without
-any gentle airs at all to introduce its heat.
-
-Jones was not very well that spring; and his throaty ailment was the
-very one that should have been spared such dreadful exposures as he
-was subjected to in that campaign. It was in the days before motor
-cars, and he and I drove about every night from one meeting to another
-in a little buggy he had, drawn by an old white mare named Molly,
-whose shedding of her coat was the only vernal sign to be detected
-anywhere. But Jones was so full of humor that he laughed at nearly
-everything--even his enemies, whom he never would call enemies. I can
-see him now--climbing down out of the buggy, carefully blanketing old
-Molly against the raw blasts, then brushing the white hairs from his
-front with his enormous hands, and running like a boy up the stairway
-to the dim little hall in the Polish quarter where the crowd had
-gathered. The men set up a shout when they saw him, and he leaped on
-the stage and, without waiting for the chairman to introduce him,--he
-scorned every convention that obtruded itself,--he leaned over the
-front of the platform and said:
-
-“What is the Polish word for liberty?”
-
-The crowd of Poles, huddling about a stove in the middle of the hall,
-their caps on, their pipes going furiously, their bodies covered with
-the strange garments they had brought with them across the sea, shouted
-in reply.
-
-“_Wolność!_”
-
-And Jones paused and listened, cocked his head, wrinkled his brows, and
-said:
-
-“What was that? Say it again!”
-
-Again they shouted it.
-
-“Say it again--once more!” he demanded. And again they shouted it in a
-splendid chorus. And then----
-
-“Well,” said Golden Rule Jones, “I can’t pronounce it, but it sounds
-good, and that is what we are after in this campaign.”
-
-Now that I have written it down, I have a feeling that I have utterly
-failed to give an adequate sense of the entire spontaneity and
-simplicity with which this was done. It was, of course, tremendously
-effective as a bit of campaigning, but only because it was so wholly
-sincere. Five minutes later he was hotly debating with a working man
-who had interrupted him to accuse him of being unfair to union labor in
-his shops, and there was no coddling, no truckling, no effort to win or
-to please on his part, though he would take boundlessly patient pains
-to explain to anyone who really wanted to know anything about him or
-his official acts.
-
-He was natural, simple and unspoiled, as naïve as a child, and “except
-ye become as little children ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”
-He fully realized that the kingdom of heaven is within one’s self; he
-was not looking for it, or expecting it anywhere outside of himself,
-certainly he was not expecting it in a political campaign, or in the
-mere process of being elected to an office. He regarded his office,
-indeed, only as an opportunity to serve, and he had been in that office
-long enough to have lost any illusions he may ever have had concerning
-it; one term will suffice to teach a man that lesson, even though he
-seek the office again.
-
-He was like an evangelist, in a way, and his meetings were in the broad
-sense religious, though he had long since left his church, not because
-its ministers were always condemning him, but for the same reasons
-that Tolstoy left his church. His evangel was that of liberty. He had
-written a number of little songs. One of them, set to the tune of an
-old hymn he had heard in Wales as a boy, had a noble effect when
-the crowd sang it. It was the _Gad im Deimle_. His wife, who is an
-accomplished musician, had transposed its minors into majors, and in
-its strains, as they were sung by the men in his shops,--and there was
-singing for you!--or by the people in his political meetings, there was
-all the Welsh love of music, all the Welsh love of liberty, and a high
-and pure emotion in the chorus:
-
-  Ever growing, swiftly flowing,
-  Like a mighty river
-  Sweeping on from shore to shore,
-  Love will rule this wide world o’er.
-
-It was his Welsh blood, this Celtic strain in him, that accounted for
-much that was in his temperament, his wit, his humor, his instinctive
-appreciation of art, his contempt for artificial distinctions, his
-love of liberty, his passionate democracy. Sitting one evening not
-long ago in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons I saw the
-great Welsh radical, David Lloyd George, saw him enter and take his
-seat on the government bench. And as I looked at him I was impressed by
-his resemblance to someone I had known; there was a strange, haunting
-likeness, not in any physical characteristic, though there was the same
-Welsh ruddiness, and the hair was something like--but when Mr. Lloyd
-George turned and whispered to the prime minister and smiled I started,
-and said to myself: “It is Jones!”
-
-
-
-
-XXIII
-
-
-There was something pathetic in that last campaign, the pathos,
-perhaps, of the last phase. The long years of opposition had begun
-to tell: there was a strong determination to defeat him. He had not
-wished to stand again for the office, but, after the Toledo custom,
-there had been presented to him an informal petition, signed by several
-thousand citizens, asking him to do so, and he had consented. But when
-he wrote a statement setting forth his position--it was a document with
-the strong flavor of his personality in it--the newspapers refused to
-publish it; some of them would not publish it even as advertising, and
-he opened his campaign on the post-office corner, standing bare-headed
-in the March wind, his son Paul blowing a saxophone to attract a crowd.
-Many of his old supporters were falling away; it seemed for a time that
-he alone would have to make the campaign without any to speak for him
-on the stump; far otherwise than in that second campaign, when, after
-having been counted out in the Republican convention, he had run for
-the first time independently, a “Man Without a Party,” as he called
-himself; and thousands, themselves outraged by the treatment his own
-party had accorded him, in the spirit of fair play had rallied to his
-standard.
-
-But now things had changed, and an incident which occurred at the
-beginning of this campaign was significant of the feeling toward him,
-though in all kindness it most not be told in detail. There was a
-prominent man in town who had publicly reviled him and criticized him
-and persecuted him, who had done that which cut him more deeply than
-all else, that is, he had impugned his motives and questioned his
-sincerity. In some human hunger for understanding, I suppose, Jones
-went to this man with his written statement of his position and asked
-him to read it, merely to read it. The fellow’s answer was to snatch
-the paper from Jones’s hand and tear it up in his face. It is easy to
-imagine what a man ordinarily would do in the face of such an amazing
-insult; surely, if ever, the time had come for the “shotgun and the
-club.” Mayor Jones was large and powerful, he had been reared in the
-oil fields, where blows are quick as tempers; he was athletic, always
-in training, for he took constant physical exercise (one of the counts
-against him, indeed, was that he slept out of doors on the roof of his
-back porch, a bit of radicalism in those days, grown perfectly orthodox
-in these progressive times), and he was a Celt, naturally quick to
-resent insult, of a temperament prompt to take fire. But he turned away
-from the fellow, without a word.
-
-He came to my office immediately afterward, and I saw that he was
-trying hard to master some unusual emotion. I shall never forget him as
-he sat there, telling me of his experience. After a little while his
-face broke into that beautiful smile of his, more beautiful than I had
-ever seen it, and he said:
-
-“Well, I’ve won the greatest victory of my life; I have won at last
-a victory over myself, over my own nature. I have done what it has
-always been hardest for me to do.”
-
-“What?” I asked.
-
-He sat in silence for a moment, and then he said:
-
-“You know, it has always seemed to me that the most remarkable thing
-that was ever said of Jesus was that when he was reviled, he reviled
-not again. It is the hardest thing in the world to do.”
-
-The struggle over the renewal of the franchise grants to the street
-railway company had already begun, and the council had attempted to
-grant it the franchise it wished, renewing its privileges for another
-twenty-five years. When Mayor Jones vetoed the bill, the council
-prepared to pass it over his veto, and would have done so that Monday
-night had it not been for two men--Mayor Jones and Mr. Negley D.
-Cochran, the editor of the _News-Bee_, a newspaper which has always
-taken the democratic viewpoint of public questions. Mr. Cochran, with
-his brilliant gift in the writing of editorials, had called out the
-whole populace, almost, to attend the meeting of the council and to
-protest. The demonstration was so far effective that the council was
-too frightened to pass the street railway ordinance. The attorney for
-the street railway company was there, and when there was a lull in the
-noise, he sneered:
-
-“I suppose, Mr. Mayor, that this is an example of government under the
-Golden Rule.”
-
-“No,” replied Jones in a flash, “it is an example of government under
-the rule of gold.”
-
-Unless it were because of his interference with the nefarious
-privileges of a few, one can see no reason why the press and pulpit
-should have opposed him. What had he done? He had only preached that
-the fundamental doctrine of Christianity was sound, and, as much as a
-man may in so complex a civilization, he had tried to practice it. He
-had taught kindness and tolerance, and pity and mercy; he had visited
-the sick, and gone to those that were in prison; he had said that all
-men are free and equal, that they have been endowed by their Creator
-with certain inalienable rights. He had said that it is wrong to kill
-people, even in the electric chair, that it is wrong to take from the
-poor, without giving them in return. He had not said these things in
-anger, or in bitterness; he had never been personal, he had always been
-explicit in saying that he, as a part of society, was equally to blame
-with all the rest for social wrongs. The only textbooks he ever used in
-his campaigns were the New Testament, the Declaration of Independence,
-and, of course, his beloved Walt Whitman. And yet the pulpits rang
-every Sunday with denunciations of him, and the newspapers opposed
-him. Why was it, because a man endorsed these old doctrines upon which
-society claims to rest, that society should denounce him?
-
-I think it was because he was so utterly and entirely sincere, and
-because he believed these things, and tried to put them into practice
-in his life, and wished them to be more fully incorporated in the life
-of society. Society will forgive anything in a man, except sincerity.
-If he be sincere in charity, in pity, in mercy, in sympathy for the
-outcast, the despised, the imprisoned, all that vast horde of the
-denied and proscribed, still less will it forgive him, for it knows
-instinctively that the privileges men have or seek could not exist in a
-system where these principles were admitted as vital, inspiring force.
-
-There was nothing, of course, for one who believed in the American
-doctrines to do but to support such a man, and when he appeared to be
-so utterly without supporters it seemed to be one’s duty more than
-ever, though I own to having shrunk from such unconventional methods as
-Jones employed. That meeting at the post-office corner, for instance;
-someone might laugh, and in the great American self-consciousness and
-fear of the ridiculous, what was one to do? The opposition, that is,
-the two old parties, the Republican and Democratic, had nominated
-excellent men against Jones; the Republican nominee, indeed, Mr. John
-W. Dowd, was a man to whom I had gone to school, an old and very dear
-friend of our family, a charming gentleman of cultivated tastes. It
-was not easy to be in the attitude of opposing him, but my duty seemed
-clear, and I went into the campaign with Jones, and we spoke together
-every night.
-
-It was a campaign in which were discussed most of the fundamental
-problems of social life. A stranger, coming to Toledo at that time,
-might have thought us a most unsophisticated people, for there were
-speculations about the right of society to inflict punishment, the
-basis of property, and a rather searching inquiry into the subject of
-representative government. This was involved in the dispute as to the
-propriety of political machines, for the Republicans by that time had a
-party organization so strong that it was easily denominated a machine;
-it was so strong that it controlled every branch of the city government
-except the executive; it never could defeat Jones. There was a good
-deal said, too, about the enforcement of law, a subject which has its
-fascination for the people of my town.
-
-
-
-
-XXIV
-
-
-Besides these interesting topics there was the subject of municipal
-home rule. This had already become vital in Toledo because, a year or
-so before, the Republican party organization through its influence
-in the state, without having to strain its powers of persuasion, had
-induced the legislature to pass a special law which deprived the Mayor
-of Toledo of his control of the police force and vested the government
-of that body in a commission appointed by the governor of the state.
-
-It had been, of course, a direct offense to Jones, and it was intended
-to take from him the last of his powers. He had been greatly roused
-by it; the morning after the law had been enacted he had appeared
-at my house before breakfast to discuss this latest assault upon
-liberty. The law was an exact replica of a law that had been passed for
-Cincinnati many years before, and that law had been sustained by the
-Supreme Court in a decision which had made it the leading case on that
-subject of constitutional law for a whole generation. Time and again
-it had been attacked and always it had been sustained; to contest the
-constitutionality of this new act seemed the veriest folly.
-
-But Jones was determined to resist; like some stout burgomaster of an
-old free city of Germany he determined to stand out against the city’s
-overlords from the rural districts, and he insisted on my representing
-him in the litigation which his resistance would certainly provoke.
-I had no hope of winning, and told him so; I explained the precedent
-in the Cincinnati case, and that only made him more determined; if
-there was one thing more than another for which he had a supreme and
-sovereign contempt it was a legal precedent. My brethren at the bar all
-laughed at me, as I knew they would; but I went to work, and after a
-few days’ investigation became convinced that the doctrine laid down in
-that leading case was not at all sound.
-
-When I came to this conviction, I induced Jones to retain additional
-counsel, one of the most brilliant lawyers at our bar, Mr. Clarence
-Brown, a man who, in addition to his knowledge of the law, could bring
-to the forum a charming personality, a wit and an eloquence that were
-irresistible. He, too, set to work, and in a few days he was convinced,
-as I, that the precedent should be overthrown. Jones refused to turn
-over the command of the police to the new commissioners whom the
-governor appointed; they applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of
-mandamus, we tried the case, and we won, overthrowing not only the
-doctrine at the Cincinnati case, but the whole fabric of municipal
-legislation in the state, so that a special session of the legislature
-was necessary to enact new codes for the government of the cities.
-
-Our satisfaction and our pride in our legal achievement was somewhat
-modified by the fact that the application of the same rule to
-conditions in our sister city of Cleveland had the effect, in certain
-cases then pending, of pulling down the work which another great mayor,
-Tom L. Johnson, was then doing in that city. It was even said that the
-Supreme Court had been influenced by the desire of Mark Hanna, Tom
-Johnson’s ancient enemy in Cleveland, to see his old rival defeated.
-Some were unkind enough to say that Mark Hanna’s influence was more
-powerful with the court, as at that time constituted, than was the
-logic of the attorneys who were representing Golden Rule Jones.
-
-But however that may have been, the decision in that case had ultimate
-far-reaching effects in improving the conditions in Ohio cities, and
-was the beginning of a conflict that did not end until they were free
-and autonomous. In my own case it was the beginning of a study of
-municipal government that has grown more fascinating as the years have
-fled, a study that has led me to see, or to think that I see, the large
-hope of our democracy in the cities of America.
-
-I regard it as Jones’s supreme contribution to the thought of his time
-that, by the mere force of his own original character and personality,
-he compelled a discussion of fundamental principles of government.
-Toledo to-day is a community which has a wider acquaintance with all
-the abstract principles of social relations than any other city in the
-land, or in the world, since, when one ventures into generalities, one
-might as well make them as sweeping as one can.
-
-Jones’s other great contribution to the science of municipal government
-was that of non-partizanship in local affairs. That is the way he used
-to express it; what he meant was that the issues of national politics
-must not be permitted to obtrude themselves into municipal campaigns,
-and that what divisions there are should be confined to local issues.
-There is, of course, in our cities, as in our land or any land, only
-one issue, that which is presented by the conflict of the aristocratic,
-or plutocratic, spirit and the spirit of democracy.
-
-Jones used to herald himself as “a Man Without a Party,” but he was
-a great democrat, the most fundamental I ever knew or imagined; he
-summed up in himself, as no other figure of our time since Lincoln,
-all that the democratic spirit is and hopes to be. Perhaps in this
-characterization I seem to behold his figure larger than it was in
-relation to the whole mass, but while his work may appear at first
-glance local, it was really general and universal. No one can estimate
-the peculiar and lively force of such a personality; certainly no one
-can presume to limit his influence, for such a spirit is illimitable
-and irresistible.
-
-He was elected in that last campaign for the fourth time, but he did
-not live very long. He had never, it seemed to me, been quite the same
-after the day when he had that experience of insult which he did not
-resent. “Draw the sting,” he used to counsel us when, in our campaign
-harangues, we became bitter, or sarcastic, or merely smart. He had
-supreme reliance on the simple truth, on the power of reasonableness.
-He never reviled again; he never sought to even scores. When he died
-the only wounds he left in human hearts were because he was no more.
-They understood him at last, those who had scoffed and sneered and
-abused and vilified, and I, who had had the immense privilege of his
-friendship, and thought I knew him,--when I stood that July afternoon,
-on the veranda of his home, beside his bier to speak at his funeral,
-and looked out over the thousands who were gathered on the wide lawn
-before his home,--I realized that I, too, had not wholly understood him.
-
-I know not how many thousands were there; they were standing on the
-lawns in a mass that extended across the street and into the yards
-on the farther side. Down to the corner, and into the side streets,
-they were packed, and they stood in long lines all the way out to the
-cemetery. In that crowd there were all sorts of that one sort he knew
-as humanity without distinction,--judges, and women of prominence
-and women whom he alone would have included in humanity, there were
-thieves, and prize-fighters,--and they all stood there with the tears
-streaming down their faces.
-
-There is no monument to Golden Rule Jones in Toledo; and since St.
-Gaudens is gone I know of no one who could conceive him in marble
-or in bronze. There is not a public building which he erected, no
-reminder of him which the eye can see or the hands touch. But his name
-is spoken here a thousand times a day, and always with the reverence
-that marks the passage of a great man upon the earth. And I am sure
-that his influence did not end here. Did not a letter come from Yasnaya
-Polyana in the handwriting of the great Tolstoy, who somehow had heard
-of this noble and simple soul who was, in his own way, trying the same
-experiment of life which the great Russian was making?
-
-
-
-
-XXV
-
-
-In the beginning, of course, it was inevitable that Jones should have
-been called a Socialist. I suppose he did not care much himself, but
-the Socialists cared, and promptly disowned him, and were at one with
-the capitalists in their hatred and abuse of him. He shared, no doubt,
-the Socialists’ great dream of an ordered society, though he would not
-have ordered it by any kind of force or compulsion, but in that spirit
-which they sneer at as mere sentimentalism. He was patient with them;
-he saw their point of view; he had, indeed, the immense advantage of
-being in advance of them in his development. He saw Socialism not,
-as most see it, from the hither side, but from the farther side, as
-one who has passed through it; he was like a man who having left the
-dusty highway and entered a wood which he thinks his journey’s end,
-suddenly emerges and from a hill beholds the illimitable prospect that
-lies beyond. Of course he could never endure anything so doctrinaire as
-Socialism, in the form in which he was accustomed to see it exemplified
-in the Socialists about him. He could not endure their orthodoxy, any
-more than he could endure the orthodoxy they were contending against.
-Their sectarianism was to him quite as impossible as that sectarianism
-he had known in other fields. Their bigotry was as bad as any. He saw
-no good to come from a substitution of their tyranny for any other of
-the many old tyrannies in the world. And naturally to one of his spirit
-the class hatred they were always inciting under the name of class
-consciousness was as abhorrent to him as all hatred was.
-
-Sometimes the Socialists, with their passion for generalization, for
-labeling and pigeonholing everything in the universe, said he was
-an anarchist. The more charitable of them, wishing to sterilize the
-term and rid it of its sinister implication, but still insistently
-scientific, said he was a “philosophic” anarchist. That is a term
-too vague to use, though in one sense, I suppose, all good men are
-anarchists, in that they would live their lives as well without laws as
-with them. Jones himself would have scorned those classifications as
-readily as he would had anyone said he was a duke or an earl. “No title
-is higher than Man,” he wrote once in a little campaign song. And he
-was that--a Man.
-
-He would not join any society or, as he said, “belong” to anything. I
-have thought so often of what he said to a book agent one day. We were
-just on the point of leaving the Mayor’s office for luncheon, and the
-individual who wishes “just a minute” was inevitably there, blocking
-the way out of the office. He was indubitably a book agent; anyone
-who has a rudimentary knowledge of human nature can identify them at
-once, but this one had as his insinuating disguise some position as a
-representative of a Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, and he was
-there to confer on the Mayor the honor of a membership in that society.
-
-“And what books am I required to buy?” asked Jones.
-
-“Well,” the agent said, “you are not required to buy any books,
-but, of course, a member of the association would naturally want
-Mr. Jefferson’s complete works.” Jones’s eyes were twinkling; “Mr.”
-Jefferson amused him immensely, of course.
-
-“They are very popular,” the man went on, “many persons are buying
-them.”
-
-“I don’t find the ideas in them very popular; certainly those in Mr.
-Jefferson’s greatest work are not popular; no one wants to see them
-adopted.”
-
-“To which one of his works do you refer?” asked the agent.
-
-“Why, the one that is best known,” said Jones, “its title is ‘The
-Declaration of Independence.’ I already have a copy of that.”
-
-The poor fellow was conscious that his enterprise was not going very
-well, but he said, with a flourish of magnanimity:
-
-“Oh, well, it’s immaterial to me whether you take the books or not, but
-of course you will wish to belong to the association?”
-
-“But I already belong to the association in which Mr. Jefferson was
-chiefly interested,” said Jones.
-
-“What is that, may I ask?” said the agent.
-
-“The United States of America,” said Jones, “and as I am a member of
-that, I see no reason why I should join anything smaller.”
-
-And then he laughed, and if there had been any uneasiness because of
-his gentle guying, it disappeared when he laid his hand on the agent’s
-shoulder and looked into his eyes in that spirit of friendliness which
-enveloped him like an aureole.
-
-He had a conception of unity that was far beyond his contemporaries,
-a conception that will be beyond humanity for many years. It was that
-conception which enabled him to see through the vast superstition of
-war, and the superstition of partizanship, and all the other foolish
-credulities that have misled the people in all times.
-
-One evening, it was just at dark, we were leaving the mayor’s office
-to walk home--we walked home together nearly every evening--and in the
-dusk a tramp, a negro, came up and asked him for the price of a night’s
-lodging. The Mayor fumbled in his pockets, but he had no small change,
-he had only a five-dollar bill, but he gave this to the tramp and said:
-
-“Go get it changed, and bring it back.”
-
-The tramp took it and disappeared, and we waited. Jones talked on about
-other things, but I was interested in the tramp; my expectation of his
-return was far more uncertain than Jones’s. But after a while the tramp
-did come back, and he poured out into the Mayor’s hand the change in
-silver coin. The Mayor complained humanly of the heavy silver which
-the Secretary of the Treasury always sends out to us, so that the new
-one-dollar bills may go to New York City, and tumbled the money into
-his trousers pocket.
-
-“But ain’t you goin’ to count it?” asked the negro in surprise.
-
-“Did you count it?” asked Jones.
-
-“Yes, suh, I counted it.”
-
-“Was it all there, wasn’t it all right?”
-
-“Yes, suh.”
-
-“Well, then, there’s no need for me to count it, is there?”
-
-The negro looked in wide white-eyed surprise.
-
-“Did you take out what you wanted?” asked the Mayor.
-
-“No, suh, I didn’t take any.”
-
-“Here, then,” said Jones, and he gave the man a half-dollar and went on.
-
-There was no possible ostentation in this; it was perfectly natural; he
-was doing such things every hour of the day.
-
-He had no need to stop there, in the dark, to impress me, his friend
-and intimate. I do him wrong even to stoop to explain so much. But I
-wonder how much good his confidence did that wandering outcast? How
-much good did it do to me? By the operation of the same law which
-brought that vagrant back to Jones’s side with all the money, I with my
-distrust, might have been treated far differently.
-
-Or so, at least, it seems to me, and I tell this incident as one which
-proves the reverence Jones had for the great natural law of love.
-For the chief count in the indictment respectability brought against
-him was that he had no reverence for law. To see and hear them when
-they said this, one would have supposed that a council or legislature
-had never been corrupted in the land. It used to amuse Jones to
-reflect that his literal acceptance of the fundamental principle of
-Christianity should have been such a novel and unprecedented thing that
-it instantly marked him out from all the other Christians and made him
-famous in Christendom.
-
-
-
-
-XXVI
-
-
-I say famous, and perhaps I mean only notorious, for in the beginning
-many of his townsmen meant it as a reflection, and not a tribute. Some
-of them said it was but an advertising dodge, a bit of demagogism, but
-as Jones applied the rule to everybody, other explanations had soon to
-be adopted, and after he had employed it about the City Hall for two
-years the situation became so desperate that something had to be done.
-Controversy was provoked, and for almost a decade, Toledo presented
-the unique spectacle of a modern city in which this principle was
-discussed as though it were something newly discovered. Some seemed
-to think that Jones had invented it; they said it was absurd, that
-it really would not work. Of course most regarded it, as most now
-regard the Golden Rule, as a pretty sentiment merely, something for
-the children in Sunday-school. It is considered, of course, as any
-sophisticated person knows, as altogether impractical, and even silly
-and absurd.
-
-To be sure, the clergymen were under some sort of professional
-necessity of treating it seriously, and they used to prepare profound
-papers, arranged in heads and subheads, with titles and subtitles, and
-after all the usual ostentatious preliminary examination of the grounds
-and the authorities, and with the appearance of academic fairness,
-in discussions that were formal, exact, redolent of the oil, bearing
-the hallmark of the schools, they would show that Jesus meant there
-were only certain exigencies in which, and certain persons to whom,
-this rule was to be applied. It was all very learned and impressive,
-but one was apt to develop a disturbing doubt as to whether one was
-of those to whom it was to be applied. It was certainly not to be
-applied to criminals, or perhaps even to politicians. It was not to be
-applied to poor people, or to the working people, unless they were in
-Sunday-school as conscious inferiors, in devout and penitent attitudes.
-And as these people were so seldom in church or Sunday-school, and as
-those who were there apparently needed no such consideration, these
-discourses left one rather uncertain as to what to do with the Golden
-Rule.
-
-All men of course believe in the Golden Rule, or say they do, but they
-believe in it only “up to a certain point,” and with each individual
-this point differs; the moment in which to abandon the Rule and take
-to “the shotgun and the club” comes to some soon, to others late, and
-to some oftener than others; but to most, if not to all of us, it
-inevitably arrives. That is why, no doubt, the world is no farther
-along in the solution of the many distressing problems it has on its
-mind.
-
-According to the standards of conduct and of “honor” inherited from
-the feudal ages, while personal violence may be conceded to be
-illegal, one is, nevertheless, still generally taught that it is wrong
-and unmanly not to resent an insult or an injury, by violence, if
-necessary,--fighting and killing, by individuals, states and nations,
-are thought to be not only honorable and worthy, but, in many cases,
-indispensable. Society has an obsession similar to that strange
-superstition of the feud, which affects the Kentucky mountaineers.
-Generally we are less afraid to fight than we are not to fight. Our
-system is based on force, our faith is placed in force, so that nearly
-all of the proposals of reform, for the correction of abuses, involve
-the use of violence in some form. We have erected a huge idol in the
-figure of the beadle, who, assisted by the constable, is to make
-society over, to make men “good.” Jones came upon the scene in America
-at a time when there was undoubtedly a new and really splendid impetus
-toward a better and higher conception of life and conduct, both in
-public and private. Yet even then no other thought seemed to possess
-the public mind than that someone should be put in prison and made to
-suffer.
-
-Men did not and do not see what Jones saw so much more clearly than
-any other reformer of his time, namely that, above all the laws men
-make with their political machines in their legislatures, there is a
-higher law, and that the Golden Rule is a rule of conduct deduced from
-that law. He saw that men, whether they knew it or not, liked it or
-not, or were conscious of it or not, had in all times been living, and
-must forever go on living, under the principle on which the Golden Rule
-is based. That is, Jones saw that this great law had always existed
-in the universe, just as the law of gravitation existed before Newton
-discovered it. It is inherent in the very constitution of things, as
-one of that body of laws which govern the universe and always act and
-react equally among men. And Jones felt that men should for their
-comfort, if for no higher motive, respect this law and get the best
-out of life by observing it; and that it should be the business of men
-through their governments to seek out this law and the rules that might
-scientifically be deduced from it, instead of putting their faith in
-their own contrivances of statutes, resolutions, orders, and decrees,
-and, when these would not work, trying to make them effective through
-grand juries and petit juries, and all the hideous machinery of jails
-and prisons, and scaffolds and electric chairs. And because he had no
-superstitious reverence for policemen or their clubs, or for soldiers
-and their bayonets and machine guns, they said he had no reverence for
-law.
-
-He had, of course, been to the legislature; he had seen the midnight
-sessions there, when statutes were enacted amid scenes of drunken
-riot and confusion, and he saw no reason why he should have reverence
-for the acts of these men. Perhaps he was wrong; I am only trying
-to tell how it appeared to him. He was not a lawyer, but he knew
-what many lawyers have never learned, that there is sometimes a vast
-difference between a statute and a law. He saw that not all statutes
-are laws; that they are laws only when, by accident or design, they
-are in conformity with those rules by which the universe is governed,
-whether in the physical or the spiritual world, and these laws, eternal
-and immutable, are invariable, self-executing, instant in operation,
-without judges to declare them, or executives to enforce them, or
-courts to say whether they are unconstitutional or not.
-
-He saw that the law on which the Golden Rule is founded, the law of
-moral action and reaction, is the one most generally ignored. Its
-principle he felt to be always at work, so that men lived by it whether
-they wished to or not, whether they knew it or not. According to this
-law, hate breeds hate and love produces love in return; and all force
-begets resistance, and the result is the general disorder and anarchy
-in which we live so much of the time.
-
-It may be that in this view of life some dangerous apothegms are
-involved; as we grow older we grow conservative, and conservatism is
-a kind of cynicism, a kind of fear, the trembling distrust of age.
-But I know that in the life concept to which Jones came in his study
-of this principle, every act of his life, no matter how trifling and
-insignificant it may have seemed, suddenly took on a vast and vital
-significance; so that the hasty glance, the unkind word, the very
-spirit in which a thing is said or done, were seen to have an effect
-which may reach farther than the imagination can go, an effect not
-only on one’s own life and character, but on the lives and characters
-of all those about him. He was always human; I say that to prevent any
-impression that he was solemn or priggish; he deliberately took up
-smoking, for instance, toward the end of his days, because, he said
-with a chuckle, one must have some vices. And sometimes when the Golden
-Rule seemed not to “work,” he would truly say it was only because he
-didn’t know how to work it. And he used to quote Walt Whitman:
-
-  The song is to the singer and comes back most to him;
-
-         *       *       *       *       *
-
-  The love is to the lover and comes back most to him;
-  The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him--it cannot fail.
-
-
-
-
-XXVII
-
-
-I first saw Tom Johnson in the early nineties in Cleveland, at a
-Democratic state convention, where one naturally might have expected
-to see him. I had gone to Cleveland to report the convention for the
-Chicago _Herald_, and since it was summer, and summer in Ohio, it was
-a pleasant thing to be back again among the Democrats of my own state,
-many of whom I had known, some of whom I honored. And that morning--I
-think it was the morning after some frenzied members of the Hamilton
-county delegation had been shooting at one another in Banks Street
-in an effort to settle certain of those differences in the science
-of statecraft which then were apt, as they are now, to trouble the
-counsels of the Cincinnati politicians--I was walking along Superior
-Street when I heard a band playing the sweet and somehow pathetic
-strains of “Home Again, Home Again.” There were other bands playing
-that morning, but the prevailing tune was “The Campbells are Coming”;
-for we might as well have been Scotchmen at the siege of Lucknow in
-Ohio during those years that James E. Campbell was Governor of our
-state. We grew to love the tune and we grew to love him, he was so
-brilliant and human and affable; but he could not pose very well in a
-frock coat, and after he had been renominated at that very convention,
-McKinley defeated him for governor.
-
-But as I was saying, it was not “The Campbells are Coming” which
-the band was playing that morning, but “Home Again,” and along the
-wide street, with an intimate sense of proprietorship that excluded
-strangers from this particular demonstration, people were saying:
-
-“It’s Tom Johnson, home from Europe!”
-
-It was his own employees who had gone forth to meet him, the men who
-worked for him in the street railway system he owned in Cleveland in
-those days, and I thought it rather a pretty compliment that a man’s
-employees should like him so well that they would turn out to welcome
-him with a band when he came home from his holiday abroad. I could
-understand their feeling when an hour later I saw Tom Johnson in the
-Hollenden Hotel, the center of a group of political friends; he seemed
-as glad as any of them to be back among so many Democrats. He still
-had his youth, and there was in his manner a peculiar, subtle charm, a
-gift with which the gods are rather stingy among the sons of men. I can
-see him now, his curly hair moist with the heat of the summer day, his
-profile, clear enough for a Greek coin, and the smile that never failed
-him, or failed a situation, to the end. He was, I think, in Congress in
-those days of which I am writing, or if he was not, he went to Congress
-soon after from one of the Cleveland districts. And while he was there
-he wrote a remarkable letter in response to a communication he had
-received from some girls who worked in a cloak factory in Cleveland,
-asking him to vote against the Wilson tariff bill when it was amended
-by adding a specific duty to the _ad valorem_ duty on women’s cloaks.
-The girls, of course, poor things, had not written the communication;
-it was written by the editor of a protectionist newspaper in Cleveland,
-and the response which Johnson sent was one of the simplest and
-clearest expositions of the evils of protection I ever read. I had read
-it when it was published, and had been delighted, but it was not for a
-dozen years that I was able to tell Johnson of my delight, and then one
-day as he and Dr. Frederic C. Howe and I were at luncheon I spoke of
-the letter. He laughed.
-
-“It was a great letter, wasn’t it?” he said.
-
-“Indeed it was,” I replied.
-
-“A wonderful letter,” he went on. “You know, it completely shut them up
-around here. The editor of that paper tried for weeks to reply to it,
-and then he gave it up, and he told me privately some time afterward
-that he was sure the theory of protection was right, but that it
-wouldn’t work on women’s cloaks. Yes, it was a great letter.” And then
-with a sigh, he added: “I wish I could have written such a letter.
-Henry George worked on that letter for days and nights before we got
-it to suit us; I’d think and think, and he’d write and write, and then
-tear up what he had written, but finally we got it down.”
-
-Henry George was the great influence in his life, as he has been the
-influence in the lives of so many in this world. Johnson had been a
-plutocrat; he had made, or to use a distinction Golden Rule Jones
-used to insist upon, he had “gathered,” by the time he was thirty,
-an immense fortune, through legal privileges. Johnson’s privileges
-had been tariffs on steel, and street railway franchises in several
-cities, and thus early in life he was almost ready for that most
-squalid of all poverty, mere possession. And then suddenly he had a
-marvelous experience, one that comes to few men; he caught a vision of
-a new social order.
-
-He was on a railway train going from Indianapolis to New York, and the
-news agent on the train importuned him to buy a novel. Johnson waved
-him aside--I can imagine with what imperious impatience. But this agent
-was not to be waved aside; he persisted after the manner of his kind;
-he had that weird occult power by which the book agent weaves his spell
-and paralyses the will, even such a superior will as Tom Johnson’s,
-and the agent sold to him, not a novel, but Henry George’s “Social
-Problems.” He was not given to reading; he read only for information,
-and even then he usually had someone else read to him. Once during his
-last illness he asked me what I was reading, and I told him Ferrero’s
-“Rome,” and tried to give him some notion of Ferrero’s description of
-the political machine which Cæsar and Pompey had organized, and of
-the private fire department of Crassus, and he said: “Well, I’ll have
-Newton read it to me.” He used to wonder sometimes half wistfully,
-as though he were missing some good in life, how it was that I loved
-poetry so, and it was somehow consoling when Mr. Richard McGhee, that
-fine Irish member of Parliament, told me one night in the House of
-Commons that when Johnson made that last journey to England he had read
-Burns to him, and that Johnson had loved and even recited certain
-passages from them. Well then, Johnson bought his book, and idly
-turning the pages began to read, became interested, finally enthralled,
-and read on and on. Later he bought “Progress and Poverty,” and as he
-read that wonderful book, as there dawned upon his consciousness the
-awful realization that notwithstanding all the amazing progress mankind
-has made in the world, poverty has kept even pace with it, stalking
-ever at its side, that with all of man’s inventions, labor-saving
-devices, and all that, there has been no such amelioration of the
-human lot, no such improvement in society as should have come from so
-much effort and achievement, he had a spiritual awakening, experienced
-within him something that was veritably, as the Methodists would say, a
-“conversion.” There was an instant revolution in his nature, or in his
-purpose; he turned to confront life in an entirely new attitude, and he
-began to have that which so many, rich and poor, utterly lack, so many
-to whom existence is but a meaningless confusion of the senses, a life
-concept. And with this new concept there came a new ideal.
-
-He at once sought out Henry George, the two became fast friends, and
-the friendship lasted until George’s dramatic death in the midst of his
-campaign for the mayoralty of New York. George used to do much of his
-work at the Johnson home in Cleveland--and used to forget to fasten his
-collar when he was called from that spell of concentration over his
-desk to the dinner table. The Johnsons were aristocrats from Kentucky,
-descended from a long line of southern ancestors. And yet Tom Johnson
-was a Democrat, from conviction and principle. In fact it seems almost
-as though the cause of democracy would never have got on at all if
-now and then it had not had aristocrats to lead it, as ever it has
-had, from the times of the Gracchi to those of the Mirabeaus and the
-Lafayettes and the Jeffersons.
-
-Tom Johnson made an instant impression when he went into politics, and
-he went in on the explicit advice of Henry George. When he arose in the
-House of Representatives at Washington to make his first speech, no one
-paid the least attention. It is, I suppose, the most difficult place in
-the world to speak, not so much because of the audience, but because of
-the arrangement; that scattered expanse of desks is not conducive to
-dramatic effect, or to any focusing of interest. The British Parliament
-is the only one in the world that is seated properly; there the old
-form of the lists is maintained, opponents meet literally face to face
-across that narrow chamber. But when Johnson arose at Washington, there
-were those scattered desks, and the members--lolling at their desks,
-writing letters, reading newspapers, clapping their hands for pages,
-gossiping, sauntering about, arising and going out, giving no heed
-whatever. But Tom Johnson had not spoken many words before Tom Reed,
-then the leader on the Republican side, suddenly looked up, listened,
-put his hand behind his ear, and leaning forward intently said: “Sh!”
-and thus brought his followers to attention before the new and strong
-personality whose power he had so instantly recognized.
-
-It was a power that was felt in that House. They tried to shelve
-him; they put him on the committee for the District of Columbia, and
-no shelf could have pleased him more, or been better suited to his
-peculiar genius, for it gave him a city to deal with. The very first
-thing he did was to investigate the revenues of the District, and he
-made a report on the subject, based on the theories underlying the
-proposition of the single tax. He tried to have the single tax adopted
-for the District, and while he failed in that design his report is a
-classic on the whole subject of municipal taxation, even if, like most
-classics, it is little read. He made some splendid speeches, too, on
-the tariff, and by a clever device, under the rule giving members leave
-to print what no one is willing to hear, he contrived, with the help
-of several colleagues, to distribute over the land more than a million
-copies of Henry George’s “Protection and Free Trade,” giving that work
-a larger circulation than all the six best sellers among the romantic
-novels.
-
-It is one of the peculiar weaknesses of our political system that
-our strongest men cannot be kept very long in Congress, and it was
-Johnson’s fate to be defeated after his second term, but he then
-entered a field of political activity which was not only thoroughly
-congenial to him, but one in which for the present the struggle for
-democracy must be carried on. That field is the field of municipal
-politics which he entered just at the time of the awakening which
-marked the first decade of the new century.
-
-
-
-
-XXVIII
-
-
-When I think of the beginning of that period my thought goes back to
-an afternoon in New York, when, sitting in the editorial rooms of
-_McClure’s Magazine_, Lincoln Steffens said to me:
-
-“I’m going to do a series of articles for the magazine on municipal
-government.”
-
-“And what do you know about municipal government?” I asked in the tone
-a man may adopt with his friend.
-
-“Nothing,” he replied. “That’s why I’m going to write about it.”
-
-We smiled in the pleasure we both had in his fun, but we did not talk
-long about municipal government as we were to do in the succeeding
-years; we had more interesting subjects to discuss just then.
-
-I had been on a holiday to New England with my friend John D. Barry,
-and had just come from Maine where I had spent a week at Kittery Point,
-in the delight of long summer afternoons in the company of Mr. William
-Dean Howells, whom, indeed, in my vast admiration, and I might say,
-my reverence for him, I had gone there to see. He had introduced me
-to Mark Twain, and I had come away with feelings that were no less
-in intensity I am sure than those with which Moses came down out of
-Mount Horeb. And Steffens and I celebrated them and their writings and
-that quality of right-mindedness they both got into their writings,
-and we had our joy in their perfect Americanism. The word had a
-definite meaning for us; it occurred to us at that time because of
-some tremendous though unavailing blows which Mark Twain had delivered
-against our government’s policy in the Philippines, the time falling
-in that era of khaki imperialism which opened in this land with the
-Spanish war and too much reading of Kipling, who, if I could bring
-myself to think that literature has any influence in America, might
-be said to have induced us to imitate England in her colonial policy.
-There comes back the picture of Mark Twain as he sat on the veranda of
-the home he had that summer at Sewell’s Bridge, a cottage on a hill
-all hidden among the pines; he sat there in his picturesque costume
-of white trousers and blue jacket, with his splendid plume of white
-hair, and he smoked cigar after cigar--he was an “end to end smoker”
-as George Ade says--and as he sat and smoked he drawled a delightful
-monologue about some of his experiences with apparitions and telepathy
-and that weird sort of thing; he said they were not to be published
-during his life, and since his death I have been waiting to see them
-in print. He had just been made a Doctor of Laws by some university
-in June of that year, a distinguishing fact known to a caller from
-the fashionable resort of York near by, who, though somewhat hazy as
-to Mark Twain’s performances in literature, nevertheless scrupulously
-addressed him as “Doctor,” and every time he was thus recognized in
-his new and scholarly dignity, he winked at us from under his shaggy
-brows. Perhaps that was part of his Americanism, too, unless it were a
-part of that universality which made him the great humorist he was,
-and philosopher, too; an universality that makes Mr. Howells a humorist
-as well as a novelist and a philosopher--the elements are scarcely
-inseparable--though Mr. Howells’s humor is of a more delicate quality
-than that of his great friend, and, as one might say, colleague, a
-quality so rare and delicate and delightful that some folk seem to
-miss it altogether. Perhaps it was the Americanism of these two great
-men and their democracy that have won them such recognition in Europe,
-where they have represented the best that is in us.
-
-I speak of their democracy for the purpose of likening it in its
-very essence to that of Golden Rule Jones and of Johnson, too, and
-of all the others who have struggled in the human cause. We owe Mr.
-Howells especially a debt in this land. He jeopardized his standing
-as an artist, perhaps, by his polemics in the cause of realism in the
-literary art, but he was the first to look about him and recognize his
-own land and his own people in his fiction; that is why it is so very
-much the life of our land as we know it, and to me there came long ago
-a wonderful and consoling lesson, when in reading after him, and after
-Tolstoy and Tourgenieff, and Flaubert, and Zola, and Valdez, and Thomas
-Hardy, I discovered that people are all alike, and like all those about
-us in every essential.
-
-Lincoln Steffens did not miss the humor in Mr. Howells’s writing,
-because he could not miss the humor in anything, though there was
-not so much humor perhaps in another writer whom we had just then
-discovered and were celebrating that day in the joy of our discovery.
-It was to me a discovery of the greatest charm, a charm that lasts to
-this day in everything the man has written, that charm of the sea and
-of ships, the romance and poetry of it all which I had felt ever since
-as a boy I found a noble friend in Gus Wright, an old sailor whose name
-I cannot speak even now without a quickening of the spirit because of
-the glamour that invested him when I sat and looked at him and realized
-that he had hunted whales in the South Pacific and had sailed the Seven
-Seas. I wish I had written him into the first of these papers, where he
-belongs; he made two miniature vessels for me, one a full rigged ship,
-the other a bark--dismantled now, both of them, alas, and long since
-out of commission....
-
-“You go down to the wharves along the East River,” Steffens was saying,
-“and you’ll see a ship come in, and after she has been made fast to
-her wharf, an old man will come out of the cabin, light his pipe, and
-lean over the taffrail; he’ll have a brown, weather-beaten face, and
-as he leans there smoking slowly and peacefully, his voyage done, his
-eye roving calmly about here and there, you’ll look at him, and say to
-yourself, ‘Those eyes have seen everything in this world!’”
-
-It was a rather big thought when you dwelt on it.
-
-“He’s seen everything in the world,” Steffens went on, “but he can’t
-tell what he’s seen. Now Conrad has those eyes, he has seen everything,
-and he can tell it.”
-
-It was Joseph Conrad, of course, of whom we were talking, the great
-Pole who even then had come to a mastery of our language that might
-shame most of his contemporary writers in it. I would not give “Lord
-Jim” for all the other sea stories that were ever written, not even
-if all the novels of Cooper and Scott and Stevenson and Dickens were
-thrown in. For Joseph Conrad can see all that the old sailor Steffens
-was imagining that day could see, and far more besides; he can see
-into the human soul. He had not written “Lord Jim” at that time, or if
-he had, I had not read it, nor had Steffens written his books about
-municipal government, to get back to the subject; too often, I fear,
-have I been thinking about some book of Joseph Conrad when I should
-have been thinking of municipal government.
-
-I did not know much about municipal government in those days, except
-what I had learned in Jones’s campaigns and that theoretical knowledge
-I had obtained in the courts as his attorney, and I had, I fear, the
-same indifference to the subject most of our citizens have. I should
-have preferred any time to talk about literature and I should prefer to
-do so now, since that is really so much more interesting and important.
-But the fact that we knew nothing about it in those days was not
-unusual; nobody knew much about it except that Mr. James Bryce had said
-that it was the most conspicuous failure of the American Commonwealth,
-and we quoted this observation so often that one might have supposed we
-were proud of the distinction. Certainly few in America in those days
-understood the subject in the sense in which it is understood in some
-of the British cities, like Glasgow, for instance, whose municipal
-democracy is so far ahead of ours, or in the German cities where
-municipal administration is veritably a science. But in Steffens’s case
-a lack of knowledge was in itself a qualification, since he had eyes,
-like the old sailor, and, like Joseph Conrad, the power to tell what he
-saw. That is, Steffens had vision, imagination, and if the history of
-the city in America is ever written he will fill a large place on its
-page.
-
-I marvel when I reflect that he could see so clearly what most had
-not even the sensitiveness to feel. He went at his task quite in the
-scientific spirit, isolating first that elementary germ or microbe, the
-partizan, the man who always voted the straight ticket in municipal
-elections, the most virulent organism that ever infested the body
-politic and as unconscious of its toxic power as the bacillus of yellow
-fever. Then he discovered the foul culture this organism blindly
-breeds--the political machine, with its boss. But he went on and his
-quest led him to the public service corporation, the street railway
-company, the gas company, the electricity company, and then his trail
-led him out into the state, and he produced a series of studies of
-politics in the American cities which has never been equaled, and so
-had a noble and splendid part in the great awakening of our time.
-
-As long as his writings exposed only the low and the vulgar
-politicians, ward heelers and bosses, and the like, he was quite
-popular; I believe he was even asked to deliver addresses before clubs
-of the _dilettante_, and even in churches, for the righteous were
-terrible in their wrath. But when he went more deeply, when he exposed
-the respectable connections of the machine politicians, some of his
-admirers fell away, and stood afar off, like certain disciples of old.
-The citizen was delighted when some city other than his own was under
-the scrutiny of the sharp eyes that gleamed behind those round glasses,
-but when he drew near for a local study, there was an uplifting of
-the hands in pious horror. Cincinnati applauded the exposure of
-Minneapolis, and St. Louis was pleased to have Philadelphia reformed.
-Reform is popular so long as someone else is to be reformed.
-
-
-
-
-XXIX
-
-
-Steffens came to Toledo occasionally, and I recall an evening when we
-sat in my library and he told me of a certain editor with whom he had
-been talking; the editor had been praising his work with a fervor that
-filled Steffens with despair.
-
-“Must I write up every city in the United States before they will see?”
-he said. “If I were to do Toledo, how that chap would berate me!”
-
-He came to Toledo early in his investigations, and I took him to see
-Jones, and as we left the City Hall in the late afternoon of that
-spring day, Steffens was somehow depressed; we had walked a block in
-St. Clair Street in silence when he said:
-
-“Why, that man’s program will take a thousand years!”
-
-It did seem long to wait. There was a time when I thought it might be
-done in a shorter period, but I have found myself under the necessity
-of extending the term from time to time. I fear now that Steffens’s
-estimate of the length of Jones’s program was rather short, but I know
-of no other way that the program can be carried out. Steffens himself
-is not so impatient now; he learned much more about our cities than he
-ever wrote or dared to write, much no doubt that he could not write.
-Great as was the data he collected, before all the conclusions could
-be drawn, all the general rules deduced, it would be necessary to have
-the data of all life, of which the cities are microcosms. The subject,
-after all, is rather large.
-
-But to some it seemed simple enough; were there not policemen patroling
-their beats ready to arrest the bad people? Thus in the early days of
-the awakening in America impatience took on the form it always takes
-with us, and men flew to the old idols of our race, the constable and
-the policeman; someone must be hounded down, someone must be put in
-prison. This was the form which the awakening took in many places, and
-many reputations were built up in that wretched work, and perhaps the
-inadequacy of the work is best demonstrated by the instability of the
-reputations. I suppose that such efforts do accomplish something, even
-though it be at such fearful cost; they may educate some, but mostly
-they seem to me to gratify a taste for cheap sensation and reward that
-prurient curiosity which has always made the contemplation of sin so
-very fascinating to our race. The reformer was abroad, seeking to make
-mankind over, but since he has no model more attractive than himself to
-offer, his work never goes very far, and he returns to his warfare on
-the cigarette, or in moments of greater courage, on the poor girl whose
-figure flits by in the darkness, followed by the reformer’s devouring
-eye.
-
-But Steffens did not write us up, as the reporters phrase it. I think
-Jones perplexed him in those first days, though he knows now that
-Jones was wholly and I had almost said solely right. Jones indeed
-perplexed most of us. A man with a program of a thousand years could
-not be expected to interest so vitally our impatient democracy, as
-would one with a program so speedy and simple that it involved nothing
-more complex than putting all the bad people in jail; and there was
-always someone ready to point out the bad people, so that it seemed
-simple, as well it might to those who had forgotten that even that
-program is six thousand years old, at least, according to Archbishop
-Ussher’s chronology. Steffens, however, was seeking types and in the
-two leading cities of Ohio he found them so perfect that he need
-never have gone further--had it not been for people like that fellow
-citizen of ours who filled Steffens with such despair. But while he
-was gathering his data on Cincinnati and on Cleveland he came to see
-us often, to our delight, and continued to come, so that he knew our
-city and our politics almost better than we knew them ourselves. He
-went to Cleveland, I remember, with some distinct prejudice against
-Tom Johnson; the prejudice so easily imbibed in gentlemen’s clubs. But
-I was delighted when, after his investigation, he wrote that story
-in _McClure’s_ which characterized Tom Johnson as the best mayor of
-the best governed city in the United States. I was delighted because
-I was flattered in my own opinion, because I was fond of Tom Johnson,
-and because it appeared just in the nick of time to turn the tide in
-Johnson’s third campaign.
-
-Jones was delighted, too; he had said almost immediately after Johnson
-became mayor of Cleveland that he “loved him” because, in appointing
-the Reverend Harris R. Cooley as Director of Charities and Corrections,
-Johnson selected a man who began at once to parole prisoners from the
-workhouse, and Jones and Johnson became friends as Johnson and Pingree
-had been friends. It was a peculiar instance of the whimsical and
-profligate generosity of the fates that the three cities grouped at the
-western end of Lake Erie like those cities Walt Whitman saw, or thought
-he saw, “as sisters with their arms around each others’ necks” should
-have had about the same time three such mayors as Pingree in Detroit,
-Johnson in Cleveland and Jones in Toledo, though the three men were
-different in everything except their democracy.
-
-Johnson’s success in Cleveland, obtained nominally as a Democrat,
-though in his campaign he was as non-partizan as Jones himself, made
-him the “logical” candidate of the Democrats in the state for governor,
-and when he was nominated for that office he burst upon the old
-Republican state like a new planet flaming in the heavens. Many of the
-Democrats found that he was entirely too logical in his democracy,
-since he was as like as not to denounce a Democratic office holder as
-any other. He went forth to his campaign that year in his big French
-touring car, a way entirely new to us, and in the car he went from
-town to town, holding his immense meetings in a circus tent which was
-taken down and sent on ahead each night. In this way he was entirely
-independent of local committees, and they did not like that very well;
-it had been his wealth more than his democracy that had made him seem
-so logical as a candidate to some of the Democrats. Such a spectacle
-had not been seen on our country roads as that great touring car
-made; it was a red car, and the newspapers called it “the red devil”;
-sometimes they were willing to apply the epithet to its occupant. It
-was inevitable, of course, that provincialism should criticize him for
-having bought his car in France instead of the home market, and I shall
-never forget, so irresistible in retort was he, the instant reply he
-made:
-
-“That complaint comes in very bad grace from you protectionists. I
-bought my car in France it is true and paid $5,000 for it, but I paid
-you $3,000 more in tariff duties to let me bring it home. You made me
-pay for it twice and I think I own it now.”
-
-Few have ever been vilified or abused as Johnson was abused in our
-state that year; his red car might have been a chariot of flame driven
-by an anarchist, from the way some of the people talked. Strange,
-inexplicable hatred in humanity for those who love it most! Tom Johnson
-campaigned that year on a platform which demanded a two-cent-a-mile
-railway fare and the taxation of railroad property at something like
-its value, or at least, he said the railroads should pay in taxes as
-much, relatively, as a man paid on his home; the poor man was paying on
-more than a sixty per cent. valuation while the railways were valued
-at eighteen or twenty per cent. This was dangerous, even revolutionary
-doctrine, of course, and Johnson was a single-taxer, supposed in
-Ohio to be a method of taxation whereby everybody would be relieved
-of taxation except the farmers who were to be taxed according to the
-superficial area of their farms. And of course Johnson was defeated,
-and yet within two years the legislature enacted the first of these
-proposals into law with but one dissenting vote. Thus heresy becomes
-orthodoxy. The proposal for taxation reform still waits, and will wait,
-I fancy, for years, since it is so fundamental, and mankind never
-attacks fundamental problems until it has exhausted all the superficial
-ones. And yet, while many other changes he contended for in his day
-have been made, while many of his heresies have become orthodoxies,
-the fear of him possessed the rural mind in the legislature until his
-death, and almost any measure could be defeated by merely uttering the
-formula “Tom Johnson.”
-
-
-
-
-XXX
-
-
-One remembers one’s friends in various attitudes, and I see Tom
-Johnson now standing on the platform in the old tent, under the
-flaring lights, with the eager crowd before him--there were never
-such intelligent audiences to speak to as those in Cleveland, unless
-it were those in Toledo--and he was at his best when the crowd was
-heckling him. He was like Severus Cassius, who, as Montaigne says,
-“spoke best extempore, and stood more obliged to fortune than his own
-diligence; it was an advantage to him to be interrupted in speaking,
-and his adversaries were afraid to nettle him, lest his anger redouble
-his eloquence.” He voluntarily introduced the custom of heckling so
-prevalent in England and Scotland, because at first he was not a
-proficient speaker; he was so simple, so direct, so positive, that
-he could state his position in a very few words. Thus, as he told me
-once, his speeches were too short for the customary political meeting
-in a state where political oratory flowed on and on indefinitely, and
-he asked the crowd to put questions to him. This stirred him up, put
-him on his mettle, stimulated his thought, and he was best at this
-short range. And no one ever got the better of him. Once an opponent
-triumphantly demanded, in a campaign in which Johnson’s administration
-was charged with extravagance:
-
-“Mr. Johnson, is it not a fact that under your administration the
-Cleveland workhouse has lost money?”
-
-“Yes, sir,” the Mayor replied promptly.
-
-“How do you explain that?”
-
-“We are not trying to make money in the Cleveland workhouse,” the Mayor
-replied instantly, “we are trying to make MEN!”
-
-Or again I see him, superintending the tearing up of street railway
-tracks, on streets where the franchises of the private company had
-expired, to make room for the rails of the city company, calmly smoking
-a cigar, and with a gesture of his expressive delicate white hand
-waving aside the latest of the many injunctions that were sued out
-against him. The battle was never lost to him, though his followers
-were often discouraged. He might have said of court injunctions as
-Napoleon said of bullets at the battle of Krasnoi:
-
-“Bah! They have been whistling about our legs these forty years!”
-
-But I see him best I think in the great hall of his home in Euclid
-Avenue, one short, fat leg tucked comfortably under him, his cigar
-in his aristocratic hand, his friends and admirers about him. It was
-a remarkable coterie of brilliant young men. One of them had been
-originally an opponent, one of those who heckled him in the tent, a
-fiery young radical not long since a blacklisted mechanic who had
-gone hungry when on strike, Peter Witt, one of the most picturesque
-personalities in Ohio politics; he became one of Johnson’s intimate
-friends and strongest supporters, and a splendid speaker on the stump.
-He was city clerk of Cleveland under all the Johnson administrations
-and is now the street railway commissioner of that city under Mayor
-Newton D. Baker, who, as city solicitor, was another of the group of
-those happy days. Mr. Baker was like a boy in appearance, with his
-sensitive face and the ideals of a poet, and a brilliant lawyer. He
-carried all the legal burden of the long street railway controversy in
-Cleveland,--it was almost a civil war--and did it all with such skill
-and ability, and withal with such grace and courtesy and good nature
-that he never offended his opponents, who were the leading corporation
-lawyers of the city. Frederic C. Howe had been elected to the council
-in Cleveland as a Republican from one of the most aristocratic wards,
-but he was won over by Johnson’s personality, was renominated by
-Johnson on the Democratic ticket, afterwards sent to the state senate
-and became one of the foremost men in the liberal movement in America;
-his books on municipal government are authorities. And Dr. Cooley; he
-was a Disciple preacher, and Johnson placed him at the head of the
-department of charities and corrections, so that, as Johnson used
-to say, instead of a preacher Dr. Cooley became a minister. It was
-delightful to be with them in those gatherings. The genuine reform of
-conditions in that city possessed them all like a passion; they were
-stimulated by a common ambition, which was, as Johnson used to say,
-to make Cleveland a city set on a hill, and though he was not a poet
-nor a maker of phrases everyone instinctively knew what he meant when
-he spoke of his city set on a hill. I do not know how much of history
-he had read, but he knew intuitively that the city in all ages has
-been the outpost of civilization, and that if the problem of democracy
-is to be solved at all it is to be solved first in the city. That
-was why he struggled for the free city, struggled to make the city
-democratic; he knew that the cure for the ills of democracy is not
-less democracy, as so many were always preaching, but more democracy.
-And how delighted he was when Fred Howe brought out his book “The City
-the Hope of Democracy.” He had the joy of seeing marshaled there in the
-thesis of a scholar all the arguments he had apprehended but had never
-reduced to terms; there they were, all in their logical order--and
-Johnson straightway sent a copy of the book to every member of the Ohio
-legislature, to their amazement no doubt, if not to their amusement.
-
-I used to like to go over to Cleveland and meet that charming group
-Johnson had gathered about him. There was in them a spirit I never saw
-in such fullness elsewhere; they were all working for the city, they
-thought only of the success of the whole. They had the city sense, a
-love of their town like that love which undergraduates have for their
-university, the _esprit de corps_ of the crack regiment.
-
-But Johnson used to set me to work with the rest of them. I went over
-there once to spend the week’s end, for rest and relaxation, and he had
-me working far into three nights on amendments to the municipal code.
-He had terrible energy, but it was a joy to work with him. I wish I had
-gone oftener.
-
-I have said enough I hope to make it clear that Tom Johnson was one
-of those mortals who have somehow been lifted above their fellows far
-enough to catch a vision of the social order which people generally
-as yet do not see. It was inevitable, of course, that such a man,
-especially since he was a rich man, should have his motives impugned,
-and I recall now with what a confidential chuckle he said to me one
-time when he had been accused of I know not what vaulting and wicked
-ambition:
-
-“I am politically ambitious; I have just one ambition; I want to be the
-mayor of a free city, and if I were, the very first thing I should do
-would be to appoint a corps of assessors who couldn’t see a building,
-or an improvement; they would assess for taxation nothing but the value
-of the land, and we would try out the single tax.”
-
-He did not realize that ambition of course; no one ever realizes his
-ambition. But he did perhaps more than any other man in America to make
-possible the coming of the free city in this land.
-
-His struggle for three-cent railway fares in Cleveland, which was but a
-roundabout method of securing municipal ownership in a state where the
-legislature in those days would not permit cities to own their public
-utilities was his great work. He lived to see that successful in a way,
-though not exactly in the way he had expected; that is another irony
-which the fates visit on the head of ambitious men.
-
-And yet that irony of the fates is not always, after all, unkind.
-Somehow, after a while, in the lengthened perspective, the broadened
-vision that reveals a larger segment of the arc, the event is seen in
-better proportion. It requires faith in one’s cause to see this always,
-and Johnson always had that faith. I shall not forget how when the
-people at last voted against him, he still could smile, and say to me:
-“The people are probably right.” It was the last time I saw him. He
-was sick then, and dying, and sadly changed; the hair that had been
-so black and curly that summer morning long before, had grown thin and
-white; the face, sadly lined with weariness, was sublimated by a new
-expression. There was the same courage in the classic profile, and the
-old smile was there. He was writing his memoirs with a courage as grim
-as that of General Grant--and he had the equanimity of Antoninus Pius.
-And on his countenance there was the expression of a purified ideal. So
-he had won; his was the victory after all.
-
-
-
-
-XXXI
-
-
-The best of life, no doubt, is made up of memories, as M. George Cain
-says, and perhaps that is why I have lingered so long over these little
-incidents of Sam Jones and Tom Johnson. I have told them in no sort of
-related order; Jones died years before Johnson; but somehow they seem
-to me to have appeared simultaneously, like twin stars in our northern
-sky, to have blazed a while and then gone out together. Different as
-their personalities were, different as two such great originals must
-have been, they were one in ideal, and even in their last words they
-expressed the vast toil and strain of the efforts they put forth to
-attain it.
-
-“Was it worth while?” asked Tom Johnson of his friend Newton Baker, a
-day or two before he died. And Sam Jones on that last day turned to his
-sister Nell, the noble spirit who had conducted the settlement work at
-Golden Rule House, and said:
-
-“‘He that endureth to the end----’ What does it say?”
-
-She repeated the Scripture to him.
-
-“Say it in Welsh,” he said, his thought returning in those ultimate
-moments to the speech they had used as children. But before she could
-direct her mind into the old sequences, the end had come.
-
-At least, there were those in town who thought it was the end. The
-stock of the street railway company went up twenty-four points the
-next morning, and some brokers issued a letter saying now that
-Jones had died the securities of that enterprise offered a golden
-investment--about the most authentic extant illustration, I suppose, of
-the utter contemptibility of privilege in these states. The politicians
-often had been heard to say that when Jones retired the non-partizan
-movement in Toledo would come to an end; in their professional analyses
-they had pronounced it a personal following not governed by principle,
-and that with the passing of the leader it would disappear and the
-voters become tractable and docile partizan automata again. And now
-that Jones was dead and one of their organization, the president of the
-council, was to succeed to the mayor’s office, the hopes they had so
-long entertained seemed at last on the point of realisation. Within a
-few weeks, therefore, an ordinance granting the street railway company
-a renewal of its rights was passed by the council.
-
-Then, instantly, the old spirit flamed anew; there were editorials,
-mass meetings, and all sorts of protest against the action, and in
-response to this indignant public feeling, the acting mayor, Mr.
-Robert H. Finch, very courageously vetoed the ordinance. But the
-machine “had the votes,” and on the following Monday night the council
-met to pass the ordinance over the veto. The members of the Republican
-organization were there, favored with seats in the office of the city
-clerk; lobbyists and the legal representatives of the street railway
-company were there. The chamber was crowded; the hot air of the small,
-low-ceiled room was charged with a nervous tension; there was in it an
-eager expectant quality, not unmixed with dread and fear and guilt. The
-atmosphere was offensive to the moral sense--a condition remarked in
-other halls in this land when councils and legislatures have been about
-to take action that was inimical to the public good.
-
-But the machine councilmen bore themselves jauntily enough; the windows
-were open to the soft night of the early autumn, and now and then some
-one sauntered in nonchalance over to the windows, and looked down
-into St. Clair Street, garish in the white and brilliant light of
-the electric signs of theaters, restaurants and saloons. The theater
-crowds were already going by, but it was to be noted that they loitered
-that evening, and were reënforced by other saunterers, as though the
-entertainment of the pavement might surpass that of the painted scene
-within. And above all the noises of the street, clanged the gongs of
-the street cars gliding by, and, for the moment, as a dramatic center
-of the scene, a squad of policemen was stationed in the lobby of the
-council chamber.
-
-This nervous, sinister mood was somehow abroad in the whole city that
-night. Mr. Negley D. Cochran had written another editorial, published
-that evening in heavy type, in the _News-Bee_, calling on the citizens
-to come out and protect their rights in the streets of their city, so
-that there were apprehensions of all sorts of danger and disaster.
-
-The council proceeded with its business; the voice of the reading
-clerk droned on in the resolutions and ordinances that represented the
-normal municipal activities of that hour, and then, suddenly, a sound
-of a new and unaccustomed sort arose from St. Clair Street, the sound
-of the tramp of marching men. Those at the windows, looking out, saw
-a strange spectacle--not without its menace; the newspaper reporters,
-some of them, embellished their reports with old phrases about faces
-blanching. Perhaps they did; they might well have done so, for the men
-came down St. Clair Street not as a mob; they were silent, marching in
-column, by sets of fours, with an orderly precision and a discipline
-almost military. And at their head there was a man whose square, broad
-shoulders and firm stride were the last expression of determination.
-He wore a slouch hat, under which his gray hair showed; his closely
-trimmed beard was grizzled; he looked, as many noted, not unlike the
-conventional portraits of General Grant. The man was Mr. Johnson
-Thurston, and he was as grim as General Grant, as brave, as determined,
-and as cool. He was widely known in Toledo as a lawyer, however, not
-as a politician; he had never been in politics, indeed, but he was in
-politics that night, surely, and destined to remain in politics for
-years to come.
-
-He brought his column to a halt under the windows of the council
-chamber. There was no room in that small chamber for such a delegation,
-or seemingly for any delegation of the people, however small. Johnson
-Thurston’s son marched beside him as an aide, bearing a soap box--the
-modern tribune of our democracy--and he placed it on the pavement for
-his father. A street car, just then halting, clanged its gong for the
-throng to make way, and at this perfect symbol of the foe they were
-opposing, Johnson Thurston shook his fist, and shouted:
-
-“Stand there! The people are attending to their business to-night!”
-
-The street car stood, and Johnson Thurston mounted his soap box,
-produced a paper and read from it in a loud voice that section of
-the Constitution in which the people retain to themselves the right
-peaceably to assemble and petition for a redress of grievances. And
-this done, he turned to his followers, gave them a signal, and there
-went up from their throats in perfect unison a mighty cry: “Let the
-franchise alone!”
-
-Three times they voiced their imperative mandate, and then, at a
-signal, they wheeled about, and marched away in the excellent order
-in which they had come. Such a demonstration, in the streets, at
-night, before a legislative body, had it occurred in a capital or in a
-metropolis, would have been historic. As it was, the cry that went up
-from those men was heard in the council chamber; and it was destined
-to ring through the town for the better part of a decade. The council
-did not pass the ordinance over the Mayor’s veto; half an hour later
-the councilmen were escorted from their chamber by the police they had
-summoned; and a sadly shaken body they were, poor fellows.
-
-Meanwhile the men who had marched with Johnson Thurston had retired
-to a vacant storeroom in Superior Street, three blocks away, over
-the door of which there was a canvas sign bearing the inscription
-“INDEPENDENT HEADQUARTERS.” There they had assembled and been drilled
-by Johnson Thurston, as college men are drilled by a leader in their
-yells, and with a solemn sense of civic duty they had marched to the
-council chamber to save their city from a quarter of a century more
-of shameful vassalage to a privileged public utility corporation. The
-threat of their presence had been sufficient, but had that proved
-unavailing, they had provided other resources. There had been all the
-while, from the hour of the opening of the doors that night, twelve
-men in the council chamber, armed with bombs, not of dynamite or any
-such anarchist explosive, but of asafœtida and sulphureted hydrogen
-and I know not what other overpowering fumes and odors, confidently
-relied upon to prevail against even so foul a stench as that which a
-privileged plutocracy can make in any of the halls of government when
-it has determined to secure another lease of its tenure.
-
-At Independent Headquarters, then, that autumn, political meetings were
-held, in which local affairs--the street-car situation especially
-and the relation it bore to the machines of political parties--were
-discussed. Because of those changes the legislature was always
-making in the government of cities, three councilman at large were
-to be elected. This was in the year 1904, in the midst of a national
-campaign. Roosevelt was running for president for his second--or his
-first term, depending on the point of view--and three of those men who
-had voted for that street railway ordinance, and were ready to vote to
-pass it over the mayor’s veto, were candidates on the Republican ticket
-for councilmen at large. The Independents who had marched with Johnson
-Thurston determined to nominate a city ticket, and they honored me by
-offering me the place at the head of that ticket as their candidate
-for councilman at large. I was writing another novel just then and
-battling as usual against interruptions, and so I begged off; it was
-not the campaign I feared, but, as I told them, the fear that I should
-be elected. We nominated a ticket, and went into the campaign, speaking
-every night, and in November, though Roosevelt carried the city by
-fifteen thousand, our candidates for councilmen at large were elected.
-Clearly, then, the non-partizan movement had not wholly died with
-Golden Rule Jones; his soul, like the soul of John Brown, was marching
-on, and still somehow led by him, and inspired by his spirit, there had
-sprung forth, like Greek soldiers from the dragon’s teeth, in Toledo
-a democratic municipal movement. First of all the cities in America,
-she had taken the initial step in freeing herself, the step all
-cities in America must take if they would free themselves from their
-masters--that of non-partizan municipal elections.
-
-
-
-
-XXXII
-
-
-The predilection of the Ohio man for politics, I believe, is well
-known in this land, where it is generally identified with a love for
-office. There is a reproach implied in the reputation which we perhaps
-deserve. An Ohio man goes into politics as naturally as a Nova Scotian
-goes to sea, and yet not all Nova Scotians go to sea. They all love
-the sea perhaps, but they do not all care to become sailors. And so
-with us Ohioans. We all love politics, though fortunately we do not
-all care to hold office, even if most people do smile indulgently
-when the modest disinclination is expressed. Perhaps such scepticism
-is quite natural in a land so saturated in privilege that even office
-holding is regarded in that light--or was until recently, for now a
-new conception is expanding in the public consciousness and there is
-hope that ere long public office will be regarded as a responsibility.
-I was quite sure that I did not care to be a councilman--that weekly
-wrangle, by night, in a room choking with the fumes of cheap tobacco,
-known as the session of the common council, was far from my tastes. And
-when the mayoralty was suggested to me I was quite as certain that I
-did not wish that. For it was not long after the death of Jones that
-it was suggested; by Tom Johnson for one, who, in his blunt way, told
-me that I should run for the place; and by Steffens, who, just then in
-Cleveland, was writing the article in which Tom Johnson was celebrated
-as “the best mayor of the best governed city in America,” and Steffens
-found time now and then to come over to Toledo to see us. “And another
-thing,” he wrote to me after one of these visits, “you’ll have to run
-for mayor.” He reached this conclusion, I believe, by a process of
-inversion. He had been talking with some of the machine politicians,
-and it was their objection to me as a candidate that caused him to
-see my duty in that light. I was at one with them on that point, at
-any rate; they could have been no more reluctant to have me run than
-I myself was. Tom Johnson, when the Democrats met in their state
-convention at Columbus that year, might propose me for governor, and
-the delegation of his county, Cuyahoga, and the delegation from my own
-county of Lucas vote for my nomination, but that stroke of political
-lightning was easily arrested by rods that had been more accurately and
-carefully adjusted, so that I could take the manuscript of “The Turn of
-the Balance” and go to Wequetonsing on the shores of Little Traverse
-Bay, where the days are blue and gold, and there is sparkling sunshine,
-and a golf links where one may find happiness, if he is on his game,
-or if he is not, consolation in that noble view from the hill--the tee
-at the old fourth and the new twelfth hole--when he may, if he wish,
-imagine himself in Italy overlooking the Bay of Naples--which is no
-more beautiful. Meredith Nicholson, a hale old Hoosier friend, as James
-Whitcomb Riley used to phrase it, was there, too, near the spot where
-he wrote that excellent novel, “The Main Chance,” and in that country
-place with him and other charming friends near by I spent the summer.
-But when I came home in the autumn the campaign was already on, and the
-Independents had all but nominated me as their candidate for mayor.
-
-They were forced to make their nominations by petition, and on the
-petitions proposing me for the office there were many thousands of
-names, pages that were stained with the grime and dust and grease of
-factories and shops--a diploma in its way, which might have made one
-proud, had not the prospect been one to make one so very unhappy. For
-I knew what the mayoralty had done to Jones. I had come to realize in
-my association with him that there is no position more difficult than
-that of the mayor of a large city in the America of our times, for
-the city is a kind of microcosm where are posited in miniature all
-the problems of a democracy, and the fact that they are in miniature
-only increases the difficulty. My ambitions lay in another field,
-and besides I had a feeling against it, dim and vague, though since
-adequately expressed in one of those fine generalizations which Señor
-Guglielmo Ferrero makes on his brilliant page; “there is no sphere of
-activity,” he says, writing of the perils of political life, “which is
-so much at the mercy of unforeseen accidents or where the effort put
-out is so incommensurable with the result obtained.” It is, of course,
-one of the privileges of the citizen in a democracy to be “mentioned”
-for public office; if no one else mentions him he can mention himself,
-and whenever someone else does mention him there are many who ascribe
-to his originality the credit for the suggestion.
-
-It seems difficult for our people to understand any man who really does
-not desire public office in a land where it has so long been regarded
-purely as a privilege to be bestowed or a prize to be contested. I
-suppose that even the blunt and grim old warrior Sherman caused the
-people to smile when he said that if nominated for the presidency he
-would not accept and if elected he would not serve. They wondered what
-he meant, and for a time it never occurred to them that he meant just
-what he said.
-
-But the day came at last when I must decide, and to a committee of the
-Independents I said that I should give them an answer in the morning.
-I thought it all over again in the watches of the night,--and the
-unfinished manuscript on my library table--and at last, since somebody
-had to do it, since somebody had to point out at least the danger of
-risking the community rights in the hands of a political machine, I
-said I would accept. I suppose that it is but an expression of that
-ironic mood in which the Fates delight to deal with mortals that it
-should be so easy to get that which one does not want; the Independents
-insisted on my standing for the office, but the only humor in that
-fact was just then too grim for pleasure, though there is always a
-compensation somewhere after all, and gloomy as I was that morning at
-the prospect of the bitter campaign and the difficulties that would
-follow if I were elected, I could laugh when “Dad” McCullough, the
-old Scotsman whom we all loved for himself and for his devotion to
-our movement, leaned forward in his chair, stroked his whiskers in a
-mollifying way and, as though he preferred even the other members of
-his committee not to hear him, said:
-
-“Would it be out of place if I suggested that in the campaign you bear
-down as lightly as possible on the infirmities of the law?”
-
-His shrewd sense even then warned him of the herring that would be
-drawn across the trail of privilege as soon as we struck it!
-
-And he was right. We had not opened our campaign at Golden Rule Hall,
-before privilege did what it always does when it is pursued, it tried
-to divert attention from itself by pointing out a smaller evil. All
-the old and conventional complaints about the morals of the city to
-which we had been used in Jones’s campaigns were revived and repeated
-with embellishments and improvements; no city was ever reviled as was
-ours by those who had failed in their efforts to control it and absorb
-the product of its communal toil. My attitude, conceived by “Dad”
-McCullough as “bearing down on the infirmities of the law,” was now
-represented as evidence of an intention to ignore the law, to enforce
-none of the statutes, and it was predicted that the election of the
-Independent ticket meant nothing but anarchy and chaos.
-
-To this “moral” issue that had served for so many years, the “good”
-people responded immediately, as they always do, and with certain
-of the clergy to lead them rallied instantly about the machine, and
-for six weeks reveled in an inspection of all the city’s vices, and
-mouseled in the slums and stews of the tenderloin for examples of the
-depravity which they declared it was the purpose and design of the
-Independents to intensify and perpetuate. Their own candidate had
-been in power for a year and a half and these conditions had existed
-unmolested, but when some of our speakers indicated this inconsistency
-in their attitude they only raged the more.
-
-But notwithstanding all this, the issue was clear; the machine had
-helped to make it clear, not only by its long opposition to Jones, but
-more recently by its efforts for the street railway company. It was the
-old issue between privilege and democracy, that has marked the cleavage
-in society in all ages. The people were trying to take back their own
-government, for the purpose, first, of preventing the street railway
-company from securing another lease of the city’s streets for a quarter
-of a century, by which, incidentally, the company would realize profits
-on about twenty-five million dollars of watered stock. But the people
-were not to be deceived; they were not to be turned off the trail so
-easily; and the entire ticket was elected, so that at the beginning of
-that new year the Independents were in control of every branch of the
-government, not only in the city, but in the county as well.
-
-
-
-
-XXXIII
-
-
-I have spoken of the Independents as though they were an authentic
-political party, when it was one of their basic principles to be
-no party at all. They were Republicans and Democrats who, in the
-revelation of Jones’s death, had come to see that it was the partizan
-that was responsible for the evil political machines in American
-cities; they saw that by dividing themselves arbitrarily into parties,
-along national lines, by voting, almost automatically, their party
-tickets, ratifying nominations made for them they knew not how, they
-were but delivering over their city to the spoiler. As Republicans,
-proud of the traditions of that party, they had voted under the
-impression that they were voting for Lincoln; as Democrats they thought
-they were voting for Jefferson, or at least for Jackson, but they had
-discovered that they had been voting principally for the street railway
-company and the privileges allied with it in interest.
-
-And more than all, they saw that in the amazing superstition of party
-regularity by which the partizan mind in that day was obsessed, they
-were voting for these interests no matter which ticket they supported,
-for the machine was not only partizan, it was bipartizan, and the
-great conflict they waged at the polls was the most absurd sham battle
-that ever was fought. It seems almost incredible now that men’s minds
-were ever so clouded, strange that they did not earlier discover
-how absurd was a system which, in order to enable them the more
-readily to subjugate themselves, actually printed little wood-cuts of
-birds--roosters and eagles--at the heads of the tickets, so that they
-might the more easily and readily recognize their masters and deliver
-their suffrages over to them. It is an absurdity that is pretty well
-recognized in this country to-day, and the principle of separating
-municipal politics from national politics is all but established in
-law. Mr. James Bryce had pointed it out long before, but Jones seemed
-to be almost the first among us to recognize it, and he probably
-had not read from Mr. Bryce; he deduced the principle from his own
-experience, and from his own consciousness, if not his own conscience,
-perhaps he had some intimation of it from the Genius of These States,
-whose scornful laugh at that and other absurdities his great exemplar
-Walt Whitman could hear, echoed as from some mountain peak afar in the
-west. But it was no laughing matter in Toledo in those days. Men were
-accused of treason and sedition for deserting their parties; it made
-little difference which party a man belonged to; the insistence was on
-his belonging to a party; any party would suffice.
-
-I have no intention, however, of discussing that principle now, but it
-was the point from which we had to start in our first campaign, the
-point from which all cities will have to start if they wish to be free.
-The task we faced was relatively greater than that which Jones had
-faced; we had a full ticket in the field, a candidate for every city
-office and a man running for the council in every ward in town. Jones
-had run alone, and though he succeeded there was always a council and
-a coterie of municipal officials who represented the other interest in
-the community. Of course he had made our work possible by the labor
-he had done, great pioneer that he was. He had been his own platform,
-as any candidate after all must be, but with our large movement it
-was necessary to reduce our principles to some form and we tried to
-do this as simply as we could. We put forth our belief that local
-affairs should be separate from, and independent of, party politics,
-and that public officers should be selected on account of their honesty
-and efficiency, regardless of political affiliations; that the people
-should be more active in selecting their officials, and should not
-allow an office-seeker to bring about his own nomination; that the
-prices charged by public service corporations should be regulated by
-the council at stated intervals; and that all franchises for public
-utilities should first be submitted to a vote of the people, that the
-city should possess the legal right to acquire and maintain any public
-utility, when authorized so to do by direct vote of its people, that
-every franchise granted to public service corporations should contain
-an agreement that the city might purchase and take over its property
-at a fair price, whenever so voted by the people, and that no street
-railway franchise should be extended or granted, permitting more than
-three-cent fares, and unless it includes provision for universal
-transfers, satisfactory service, and reasonable compensation for the
-use of bridges, and we demanded from the legislature home rule, the
-initiative and referendum and the recall.
-
-Perhaps it was not such a little platform after all, but big indeed,
-I think, when one comes to consider its potentialities, and if anyone
-thinks it was easy to put its principles into practice, let him try it
-and see! It was drawn by that Johnson Thurston of whom I spoke, and
-by Oren Dunham and by Elisha B. Southard and others, citizens devoted
-to their town, and already with a prescience of the city spirit. They
-succeeded in compressing into those few lines all we know or need to
-know about municipal government, and ages hence our cities will still
-be falling short of the ideal they expressed on that little card. There
-were many who went with us in that first campaign who did not see all
-the implications of that statement of principles; none of us saw all
-of them of course. The movement had not only the strength but the
-weaknesses of all so-called reform movements in their initial stages.
-Those who were disappointed or disaffected or dissatisfied for personal
-reasons with the old party machines, no doubt found an opportunity for
-expression of their not too lofty sentiments, although later on when
-they saw that it was merely a tendency toward democracy they fell away,
-not because the movement had deserted its original ideals but because
-they at last understood them.
-
-As I now look back on that first campaign, on the experience I had so
-much dreaded, the perspective has worked its magic, and the hardships
-and difficulties have faded away, even, I hope, as its enmities have
-faded away, though remembering Jones’s admonition to “draw the sting”
-I tried to keep enmities out of it. Since I could not bring myself
-to discuss myself, I resolved not to discuss my opponents, and I
-went through the campaign without once mentioning the name of one of
-them--there were four candidates for mayor against me--without making
-one personal reference to them. And never in any political campaign
-since have I attacked an opponent. It was enough to discuss the
-principles of our little platform; and the first task was to get the
-electors to see the absurdity of their partizanship and to make clear
-the necessity of having a city government that represented the people
-or, since that phrase is perhaps indefinite, one that did not represent
-the privileged interests of the city.
-
-The campaign was like the old Jones campaigns, though not altogether
-like them.
-
-The legislature, which is always interfering as much as possible with
-the cities, had changed the time of holding the municipal elections
-from the spring to the autumn, one change wrought by a legislature in
-cities that the people approved, since instead of those raw spring
-winds we now have the glorious weather the autumn usually brings us
-in the lake regions, with a sparkling air and a warm sun, and a long
-procession of golden days, on which one really should be playing golf,
-if one could play golf in the midst of a political campaign, which one
-could not, since art and politics, or at least the practice of them,
-are wholly incompatible.
-
-There was no old gray Molly to jog about from one meeting to another,
-and if there had been, she could not have jogged fast enough for the
-necessities of that hour; and we established new precedents when Percy
-Jones, the son of the Golden Rule Mayor, drove me about at furious
-speed in his big touring car, the “Grey Ghost” the reporters called
-it, and it streaked through the night, with its siren singing, from
-place to place until I had spoken at half a dozen meetings. Every day
-at noon it wheeled up to the entrance of the factories and shops as the
-men were coming out for their noon hour. And such meetings I believe
-were never held anywhere; there was an inspiration as the men crowded
-about the car to hear the speeches; they were not politicians, they
-were seeking nothing, they were interested in their city; and in their
-faces, what is far above any of these considerations, there was an
-eager interest in life, perhaps a certain hunger of life which in so
-many of them, such were the conditions of their toil, was not satisfied.
-
-
-
-
-XXXIV
-
-
-As I sat and looked out over the crowds that poured from the shops and
-stood, sometimes for the whole of the noon hour, in discomfort perhaps
-if the wind was off the lake, and saw the veritable hunger for life
-that was in their faces, a hunger surely which no political or economic
-system, however wise and perfect, could satisfy, I could not help
-thinking that it was a pity the clergy did not understand these people
-better, for, after all, the message of the Carpenter who came out of
-Nazareth was for the workers and the poor, and He had passionately
-thrown Himself on their side. It might have been suggested to that
-pastor who complained bitterly that his own pews were empty on Sunday
-evenings while the streets outside his church were crowded with people
-who for one evening at least were joyous and free from care, that the
-Master whom he served would have asked no better congregation than they
-and no better auditorium than the street.
-
-But this pastor was used to making suggestions, not to receiving
-them; he was not of a mind as open as that one who actually came to
-me once to ask me how he could get the workingmen to hear him preach.
-He had not failed, he said, to go to them; he had advertised on a
-placard hung at the entrance of a factory where two thousand men were
-working that on a Monday at noon he would speak to them. They had
-known of him, for he had recently been celebrated in the newspapers as
-having inaugurated a crusade to close the cheap theaters, whose lurid
-melodramas,--I believe lurid is the word in that connection unless
-the melodramas are “novelized” and sold for a dollar and a half,--he
-said, were detrimental to morals, as no doubt they were. And so when
-he appeared, punctually, on that Monday noon, at the rendezvous
-appointed by his poster, the workingmen were ready and, when he stood
-up to preach to them, they received him with a deafening din, made by
-pounding on pieces of metal they had brought from the shop, so that
-the poor fellow could not speak at all, and when, with roars of awful
-laughter they unfurled some ribald banner fresh from the paint shop of
-their establishment, advising him to go to hell where he was always
-consigning so many of his fellow human beings, he went away quite
-broken-hearted. It was in that mood and perhaps a little chastened
-by his experience that he came to see me. I could agree with him, of
-course, that the men had acted like the perfect barbarians they could
-be at times, but there was nothing I could do for him, nothing I could
-tell him. I learned long ago that you cannot tell a man anything unless
-he knows it already!
-
-And yet that preacher’s case was perfectly simple. He had come to
-the city not long before, and of course, had come from the country.
-His training and his experience had all been rural, he knew nothing
-whatever of the life of our cities or of their problems; he thought
-only in agrarian sequences. He had a little code of conduct consisting
-of a few perfectly simple negatives, namely, men should not use
-tobacco, or liquor, or attend theaters or circuses, or play with
-colored cards, or violate (that is, do anything pleasant on) the
-Sabbath day. And whenever he saw people doing any of these things it
-was his duty to dissuade them from doing them, and if he could not
-dissuade them, then it was the duty of the authorities to force the
-people to stop doing these things by sending policemen after them.
-Poverty was caused either by drink, or by idleness, though usually by
-drink, and if the saloons were closed, drinking would cease!
-
-This was the man’s conception. Of the condition of the workingmen in
-the cities he had literally no notion. He knew they worked, and that
-working made them tired, of course, just as it made farmers tired.
-He saw no difference between the labor in the agricultural field and
-that in the industrial field. That men who had been shut up in dusty
-factories for six days, working intently at whirling machines, under
-the bulb of an electric light, felt, when they came to the one day of
-rest, that they should like to go outdoors and breathe the air, and
-have some relaxation, some fun, had never occurred to him. That they
-had to work so hard, too, that stimulants were perhaps a necessity,
-never occurred to him, just as it had never occurred to him that
-when one of these workers left home there was no place for him to go
-unless he went to a saloon, where there were light and warmth and
-companionship, and, above all, liberty; or to a cheap theatre or in the
-summer to a baseball game. And he could not understand why these men
-resented his suggestion that they give up all these things, and instead
-do as farmers do on Sunday, or as they pretend to do, that is, stay
-indoors, or, if they do go out, go out to attend church.
-
-And what was most curious of all, he had not the slightest notion of
-what we meant when we spoke of the street railway problem. He knew,
-of course, that it was proposed to reduce the fare a cent or two
-cents, but that was not important; what were two cents? That there
-was anything immoral in watering stock, in seizing millions of the
-communal value, had never occurred to him, and in the midst of all
-the complexities of city life he remained utterly naïve, bound up in
-his little code, with not the glimmer of a ray of light on social
-conditions or problems, or of economics, or, in a word, of life. To
-him there were no social problems that the Anti-Saloon League could
-not solve in a week, if wicked officials would only give them enough
-policemen and a free rein to do it.
-
-And so he wondered why the workingmen would not come to hear him
-preach, or at least would not listen to him at the door of their shop!
-
-And most of the parsons in the town--at that time, though it is not
-so any more, so rapidly have changes come in our thought--were of
-this frame of mind. Not one of them supported our cause; many of them
-denounced it, and continued to denounce it, for years. Now and then
-there was one who might whisper to me privately that he understood
-and favored our efforts, but not one ever spoke out publicly, unless
-it were to denounce us. And several times they attacked me in their
-prayers. For instance, if--after I became mayor--I went to deliver
-an address of welcome, and a preacher was there to open the assembly
-with prayer, he sometimes would take advantage of the situation and,
-in the pretense of asking a blessing on the “chief magistrate of our
-beloved city,” point out my short-comings and read me a lecture on
-my duties with his eyes shut and his hands folded. To that attack it
-would have been necessary, I presume, though I am not quite sure of
-the ecclesiastical etiquette, to reply with my eyes shut and my hands
-folded, but Jones had said: “When He was reviled, He reviled not
-again,” and “He that endureth to the end.” It seemed as good a plan
-as any. I never replied to these or any other of their attacks. Some
-of the leaders of our movement always insisted that the preachers
-opposed us because they were influenced, according to the historical
-precedents, by their economic dependence on the privileged class. But
-if that is true I am sure the influence was unconscious in most cases,
-and that they simply did not understand. They were all desperately
-sincere. That was the chief difficulty with them.
-
-Indeed, I found it better never to reply to any criticisms or attacks
-whatever. The philosophy of that attitude has been pretty well set
-forth I think by Emerson, though it has been so long since I have read
-it that I do not now know in which of his essays or his poems or his
-lectures he revealed it, though probably it would be found in all three
-since, shrewd Yankee that he was, he cast every thought he had in three
-forms. Had he lived in our day he might in addition have dramatized
-each one of them. But from his advice never to apologize, one may
-proceed to the virtue of never explaining. It saves an immense amount
-of time and energy, for since a politician’s enemies are legion, and
-are constantly increasing in number, and can attack him, as it were, in
-relays, he must have enormous energy if he is to reply in detail to all
-of them; he will find himself after a while more desperately involved
-than was the man in Kipling’s story, who through the Indian Government
-kept his enemy toiling night and day to answer foolish questions about
-pigs, and, what was worse, explaining his previous answers.
-
-Telling what one is going to do is equally as foolish as explaining
-what one has done, or denying what one has not done, and so promises
-could be dispensed with as easily as retorts and explanations. Long
-catalogues of promised prodigies and miracles are of course absurd,
-and the bawling and blowing politician (as Walt Whitman called him)
-can make them as fluently in his evil cause as can the purest of the
-reformers. I had been disgusted too often with such performances to
-be able to enter into competition of that sort, and so let our little
-platform speak for itself and did not even promise to be good. And the
-people understood.
-
-I have often heard men complain of the strain and fatigue of political
-campaigning, and I sometimes think much of their distress arises from
-the fact that they campaign in ways that are not necessary, if nothing
-more derogatory is to be said of them. There is of course the fatigue
-that comes of nervous strain and anxiety, and this is very great, but
-the haggard visage and the husky voice are all unnecessary. It is no
-wonder to be sure that some men break down in campaigns, since their
-cause is so bad that anyone might well be expected to sicken in its
-advocacy, and in furthering it it is perhaps inevitable that their
-efforts partake in a measure of its corruption. There is no exercise
-that is physically more beneficial than speaking, especially speaking
-in the open air, provided one knows how to use his voice and does not
-attempt to shout up the wind; and two or three speeches at noon, just
-before luncheon and four or five more in the evening after dinner may
-be recommended as an excellent course in physical culture, if when
-one is done one’s speeches for the evening one will go home and, for
-an hour, read, say “Huckleberry Finn” or “Tom Sawyer” before he goes
-to bed. I can recommend these two great American novels with entire
-confidence in their power to refresh, and in their deep and true and
-delightful philosophy to correct aberrations in the point of view--of
-one’s self, in the first place, and of some other things of much more
-importance than one’s self. If the cause be one in which one believes
-there is an incomparable exhilaration in it all. And it was with some
-pride that I came through that first campaign without having lost
-either my temper or my voice.
-
-There must always remain the memory of those throngs in the meetings,
-those workingmen who came pouring out of the shops and factories at
-noon, glad as school boys to be released for a little while from
-toil, laughing, whistling, engaging in rude pleasantries, jostling,
-teasing and joking each other, and then, suddenly, pausing, gathering
-about the motor car, drawing closer, pressing up to the foot-board,
-and listening, with eager, intent faces, in which there was such
-instant appreciation of a joke, a pleasantry, anything to make them
-laugh, and yet somehow the adumbration of a yearning and a hope. Lyman
-Wachenheimer--who as judge of the police court once had fined Jones
-for contempt of court, but had come later to agree with him and now
-was candidate for prosecuting attorney of the county--would stand up
-in the car, lean over, and speak to them out of the splendid new faith
-in democracy that had come to him, and the rest of us in our turn
-would speak. We did not ask them to vote for us; our message was at
-least higher than that old foolish and selfish appeal. First of all we
-wished them to vote for themselves, we wished them to vote their own
-convictions, and not merely to follow with the old partizan blindness
-the boss or the employer or someone else who told them how to vote.
-And all too soon for the orators warming to their work--they must
-speak rapidly, they must speak simply and come to the point, for the
-demands of the street meeting are obdurate and out under the open sky
-there is short shrift for insincerity or any of the old pretense and
-buncombe--the whistle blows, the men turn and scatter, the crowd melts
-away, a few linger to the last minute to catch the last word, and then
-they turn and run, and as they go they lift high the perpendicular
-hand--Walt Whitman’s sign of democracy.... Do you know it? Sometimes
-one of the section gang working on the railroad, pausing in his labor
-while the Limited sweeps by, looks up and to the idle one on the rear
-platform of the observation car, going for his long holiday, he waves
-his hand in a gesture instinct with grace and the sincere greeting
-of a fellow human being, and perhaps because--alas!--the moment of
-their swift and instantly passing communication is isolated from all
-the complexities of our civilized life, because it is to vanish too
-soon for the differences men have made between themselves to assert
-their distinction, there is that one instant of perfect understanding.
-Sometimes a man in a boat sailing by will hail you with this gesture
-from his passing craft; he is safe from long contact, he can run a
-risk and for that little moment yield to the adventure of picking up
-an acquaintance. Sometimes it is the engineer of a locomotive leaning
-out of his cab window, giving you perhaps a droll wink, and there are
-tramps who from a box car will exchange a friendly greeting. And I
-shall never forget the little Irish sailor up on the boat deck with
-whom I talked in the early darkness of an autumn evening in the middle
-of the Atlantic, with the appalling loneliness of the sea as night came
-down to meet it in mystery, and the smoke from the funnels trailed up
-off to the southwest on a rising and sinister wind; he told me of his
-mother and his uncle--“who makes his five guineas a week and doesn’t
-know the taste of liquor”--and of his little ambitions, and so, after
-a bit, of the mysteries of life, with a perfect _camaraderie_, as we
-stood there leaning over the rail, and then, suddenly, when we parted,
-invested himself with a wholly different manner, and touched his cap in
-a little salute and left me to the inanities of the smoking-room.
-
-It was something like that, those intimacies, vouchsafed for a moment
-in our early meetings, whether those at noon or those at night, in the
-suffocating little halls, or the cold tent, with the torches tossing
-their flames in your eyes as you spoke, and it was even that way in
-those curious meetings down in the darker quarter of the town, where
-the waste of the city lifted up faces that were seared and scarred with
-the appalling catastrophes of the soul that had somehow befallen them,
-and there was unutterable longing there.
-
-The one thing that marred these contacts was not only that one was
-so powerless to help these men, but that one stood before them in an
-attitude that somehow suggested to them, inevitably, from long habit
-and the pretense of men who sought power for themselves, that one
-needed only to be placed in a certain official relation to them, and
-to be addressed by a certain title, to be able to help them. It was
-enough to make one ashamed, almost enough to cause one to prefer that
-they should vote for someone else, and relieve one from this dreadful
-self-consciousness, this dreadful responsibility.
-
-And these were the people! These were they who had been so long
-proscribed and exploited; they had borne a few of the favored of the
-fates on their backs, and yet, bewildered, they were somehow expectant
-of that good to come to them which had been promised in the words
-and phrases by which their very acquiescence and subjugation had so
-mysteriously been wrought--“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
-
-Where? And for them, when? Not through the efforts of those who
-employed cold phrases about “good” government, and “reform,” and
-“business” administrations, and efficiency methods, and enforcement
-of the laws, and law and order, and all that sort of thing, and class
-consciousness, and economic, or any other interpretation of history,
-or through initiatives, referendums and recalls. What good would any
-of these cold and precise formulæ do them? Better perhaps the turkey
-at Thanksgiving, and the goose at Christmas time which the old machine
-councilman from the ward gave them; of course they themselves paid for
-them, but they did not know it, and the councilman did not know it; he
-had bestowed them with the voice of kindness, in the same hearty human
-spirit in which he came to the wedding or the wake, or got the father
-a job, or the oldest son a parole from the workhouse, and rendered a
-thousand other little personal services. Perhaps Bath House John and
-Hinky Dink were more nearly right after all than the cold and formal
-and precise gentleman who denounced their records in the council. For
-they were human, and the great problem is to make the government of a
-city human.
-
-There were many, of course, even in our own movement, who were not
-concerned about that; I was strongly rebuked by one of them once in
-that very first campaign for declaring that we were no better than
-anyone else, and that all the “good” men of the world could not do the
-people much good even if they were elected to the city government for
-life. No, we may have efficient governments in our cities, and honest
-governments, as we are beginning to have everywhere, and, happily,
-are more and more to have, but the great emancipations will not come
-through the formulæ of Independents, Socialists, or single-taxers,
-nor through Law and Order Leagues, nor Civic Associations. Down
-in their hearts these are not what the people want. What they want
-is a life that is fuller, more beautiful, more splendid and, above
-all, more human. And nobody can prepare it and hand it over to them.
-They must get it themselves; it must come up through them and out of
-them, through long and toilsome processes of development; for such is
-democracy.
-
-“That man’s program will take a thousand years!” Lincoln Steffens had
-said in despair that day I introduced him to Jones. Yes--or a hundred
-thousand. But there is no other way.
-
-
-
-
-XXXV
-
-
-The most efficient executive of which there is any record in history is
-clearly that little centurion who could say: “For I also am a man set
-under authority, having under me soldiers; and I say unto one, go, and
-he goeth; and to another, come, and he cometh; and to my servant, do
-this, and he doeth it.”
-
-In my experience as an executive I learned that it was easy to say
-“Go,” but that the fellows did not go promptly; I could say “Come,”
-and he came--after a while, perhaps, when I had said “Come” again, and
-that sometimes, having said “Do this,” I had to go myself and do it, or
-leave it undone.
-
-Executive ability is a mysterious quality inhering in personality, and
-partaking of its mysteries.
-
-I had gone into the mayor’s office feeling that I was about the most
-ill-prepared man for such a job in the town. Naturally I had turned to
-Tom Johnson, who had a tremendous reputation as an executive; even his
-worst enemy, as the saying is, would not deny his wonderful executive
-ability. I went to him in a sort of despair, and he laughed and leaned
-over and whispered----
-
-But perhaps after all I should not tell. It was spoken in confidence.
-And it is ungenerous and unkind to destroy the cherished illusions of
-the world, almost as unkind, I was about to say, as it is difficult,
-since there is nothing the world so cherishes and hugs to its sad
-old withered bosom as it does its illusions. It may be that they
-are entirely necessary to it, it may be that it could not get along
-without them. What would this nation have done, after all, if it had
-not been for executive ability and the judicial temperament? The
-judicial temperament consists, of course, in nothing more than the calm
-assurance which enables one to put off till to-morrow problems that
-should be decided to-day, for if allowed to go long enough problems
-will solve themselves, just as letters unanswered long enough despatch
-their own replies.
-
-I had deduced that generalization for myself long ago, while waiting
-for judges to hand down opinions, and then in decisions reading the
-well-known formula: “The court does not find it necessary to pass on
-this particular point at this time.” Why, I applied one time to the
-Supreme Court, on a Wednesday morning, for a stay of execution on
-behalf of a man who was to be burned alive in our electric chair on
-the following Friday, and the judicial temperament who at that time
-happened to be chief justice calmly said that the application would be
-taken under advisement and a decision handed down in due course, which,
-at the earliest, was the following Tuesday morning. But the governor
-half an hour afterward said, “Oh, well, don’t worry; if the court
-doesn’t act, I’ll reprieve him,” an example, perhaps, of what I had in
-mind when I was writing those vague thoughts about making government
-human. But executive ability! I had, and still have, great admiration
-and reverence for that----
-
-But Tom Johnson leaned over that afternoon, as we sat there in the
-committee room of the House at Columbus, and laughed and whispered:
-
-“It’s the simplest thing in the world; decide every question quickly
-and be right half the time. And get somebody who can do the work.
-That’s all there is to executive ability.”
-
-I looked at him in amazement. He had grown quite serious.
-
-“There’s another thing,” he added. “Don’t spend too much time in your
-office. A quarter of an hour each day is generally too long, unless
-there are a whole lot of letters. Of course,” he went on reflectively,
-“you can get clerks who can sign your name better than you can.”
-
-
-
-
-XXXVI
-
-
-The first thing was to get men who could do the work, a difficulty
-made greater because we have been accustomed to bestow public offices
-as rewards for political service; the office is for the man, not the
-man for the office. I had a friend, a young man, who had never been
-in politics in his life, though he had been born and reared in Ohio.
-He was of an old, wealthy and aristocratic family, a graduate of an
-eastern university. His name was Franklin Macomber. I appointed him a
-member of the Board of Public Safety--we still had the board plan of
-government then--and the appointment to office of a young aristocrat
-afforded the newspapers and cartoonists an opportunity for ridicule
-which they did not overlook. But I knew the boy. I had seen him play
-football, for one thing, and I knew how he managed his own business.
-The vigor and the nerve he had displayed on the football field at once
-showed in his duties, and the ability and devotion he displayed in his
-own affairs he applied in the public service. The criticism to which
-the administration was constantly subjected distressed him; he heard
-so much of it at the fashionable club where he had his luncheons. One
-afternoon he came into City Hall with an expression more somber than
-usual, and as he sat down in my office he began:
-
-“They are saying----”
-
-“Who are saying?” I asked.
-
-“The people,” he replied.
-
-He had come, of course, from his luncheon at the club. His motor car
-was at the door of the city hall, and I asked him to take me for a
-drive, and I suggested certain parts of town through which, for a
-change, we might go. We ignored the avenues and the boulevards, and for
-two hours drove about through quiet streets far from the life of the
-town as we knew it and as all men down in the business section knew
-it--the old third ward, where the Poles lived, and around to the upper
-end of the old seventh where the shops and factories were, and then on
-over through the eighth and the ninth, and so up to the Hill, and after
-we had passed by all those blocks and blocks of humble little homes,
-cottages of one story, and all that, I asked him if he knew what the
-folk who lived in them were saying about the administration.
-
-“Why, no,” he answered. “I never talk with any of them.”
-
-“Well,” I ventured to say, “they are the people, they who live in those
-little houses with the low roofs. It is important to know how they
-feel, too.”
-
-I always felt that he had a new vision after that; he saw that if
-government was to mean anything to these persons, it must be made
-human, and the reforms in the police and fire departments he wrought
-out in that spirit were such that when he died, in not quite four
-years, when he was just turned thirty, the cartoonist had long since
-ceased to caricature him as an idle fop, and the newspaper editorials
-mourned him, in common with most of the community, as one of the best
-public servants our city, or any city, ever had.
-
-
-
-
-XXXVII
-
-
-I went into the mayor’s office, as I said, all unprepared. My equipment
-was what the observations of a political reporter, a young lawyer’s
-participation in the politics of his state, and an intimacy with Golden
-Rule Jones could make it. It was not much, though it was as much
-perhaps as have most men who become municipal officials in our land,
-where in all branches of the civil service, training and experience,
-when they are considered at all, seem to be the last requisites. The
-condition I suppose is implicit in democracy, which has the defects of
-its own virtues, and founds its institutions in distrust. They order
-these things better in Germany, by committing the administration of
-municipal affairs to trained men as to a learned profession, though the
-German cities have the disadvantage of having so reformed their civil
-service that it is a monstrous bureaucracy. I had been chosen chiefly
-because I had been the friend of my distinguished predecessor, and
-for a long time I was so inveterately referred to as of that honored
-relation, so invariably introduced as the successor of Golden Rule
-Jones, that I was haunted by the disquieting dread that I was expected
-to be, if not a replica of him, at least some sort of measurable
-imitation of his manners and methods, the most impossible achievement
-in the world, since his was a personality wholly original and unique.
-And then besides, a man prefers to be himself. But of all those, and
-they were many and respectable, who doubted my ability, there was none
-whose distrust could exceed my own. I knew one thing, at any rate, and
-that was, that I did not know.
-
-Aside from my political principles, which I presume may as well be
-called liberal, and certain theories which were called radical, though
-even then I knew enough of human nature to know that they could not be
-realized, especially in one small city in the American Middle West,
-I had been able to make, or at least to recognize when others made
-them, as Mr. Bryce and most of the students of municipal government in
-America had done, two or three generalizations which, upon the whole,
-after four terms in a mayor’s office testing them, I still believe
-to be sound. The first was that, whatever the mere form of local
-government, our cities were directly ruled by those small coteries we
-had come to call political machines; the second, that these machines
-ruled the cities for the benefit of public utility corporations; and
-the third, that the legal power through which this was accomplished
-was derived from legislatures controlled by the same persons in the
-same interest. That is, the people had no voice in their own affairs;
-representative government itself had disappeared. Therefore these
-remedies seemed to be indicated, as the doctors say--non-partizan city
-elections, municipal ownership, and home rule for cities. This was the
-task, this was the program.
-
-We had already defeated the machines; Jones had made that victory
-possible by his great pioneer work in destroying the superstition of
-party regularity. I say defeated the machines, when perhaps I should
-say checked the machines, since the bosses remained and the partizans
-who made them possible. And the public utilities were in private
-hands, the street railway company still was there, desperate because
-its franchises were about to expire, and its securities, through
-the financiering too familiar to America in these latter days, six
-times the amount of its actual investment. And down at Columbus, the
-legislature still was sitting, controlled by rural members who knew
-nothing of cities or of city life or city problems, farmers and country
-lawyers and the politicians of small towns, who, in the historic
-opposition of the ruralite to the urbanite, could not only favor their
-party confreres and conspirators from the city--machine politicians
-to whom they turned for advice--but gain a cheap _réclame_ at home
-by opposing every measure designed to set the cities free. Thus the
-bosses in both parties, the machine politicians, the corporations, and
-their lawyers, promoters, lobbyists, kept editors, ward heelers, office
-holders, spies, and parasites of every kind were lying in wait on
-every hand. And besides, though inspired by other motives, the “good”
-people were always insisting on the “moral” issue; urging us to turn
-aside from our larger immediate purpose, and concentrate our official
-attention on the “bad” people--and wreck our movement. Our immediate
-purpose was to defeat the effort of the street railway company to
-obtain a franchise, to prevent it from performing the miracle of
-transmuting twenty-five millions in green paper into twenty-five
-millions in gold, and thereby absorb the commercial values of half a
-century. To do this it was necessary to win elections for years, and
-to win elections, one must have votes, and “bad” people have votes,
-equally with “good” people, and if one is to judge from the comment of
-the “good” people on the election returns, the “bad” people in most
-cities are in the majority. On that point, I believe, the reformers and
-the politicians at least are agreed. More than this, we had to obtain
-from reluctant legislatures the powers that would put the city at least
-on equal terms with the corporations which had always proved so much
-more potent than the city. Such was the struggle our movement faced,
-such was the victory to be won before our city could be free from the
-triumvirate that so long had exploited it, the political boss, the
-franchise promoter, and the country politician. The Free City! That was
-the noble dream.
-
-Well might the wise and sophisticated laugh at their mayor and call him
-dreamer! It was, and, alas, it is a dream. But youth is so sublimely
-confident, and counts so little on opposition. Not the opposition of
-those who array themselves against it--that was to be expected, of
-course, that was part of the glorious conflict--but the opposition from
-within the ranks, the opposition on the hither side of the barricade.
-For youth thinks, sometimes, that even opponents may be won, if only
-they can be brought to that vantage ground whence one inevitably
-beholds the fair and radiant vision. It had not expected the falling
-away of followers, of supporters, even of friends--the strangely
-averted eye on the street, the suddenly abandoned weekly call, the
-cessation of little notes of encouragement, the amazing revelations of
-malignity and bitterness at election times, and the flood increasing in
-volume at each succeeding election. One man, thought to be devoted to
-a cause, fails in his desire to secure an office; another you refuse a
-contract; he whom you neglected to favor in January punctually appears
-in the opposition ranks in November, one by one they drop away, and
-multiply into an army. Even in the official group in the City Hall and
-in the council, there are jealousies, and childish spites, and pitiable
-little ambitions and with them misunderstanding, gossip, slander,
-anonymous attacks, lies, abuse, hatred, until youth makes the awful
-discovery that there is, after all, in human nature, pure malice, and
-youth must fight hard to retain its ideals, so continually are all the
-old lovely illusions stripped away in this bewildering complication of
-little tragedies and comedies we call life.
-
-To be sure, youth might have known, having read the like in books from
-infancy, and having made some reflections of its own on the irony of
-things, and indulged from time to time in philosophizings. But that was
-about the experience of others, from which none of us is wise enough
-to learn. Most of us indeed are not wise enough to learn from our own.
-It is all a part of life. What a thing human life is, to be sure, and
-human nature! _Ay di mi!_ as Carlyle used to say. Patience, and shuffle
-the cards!...
-
-... I had no intention of recalling such things. Did not Jones say that
-when the Golden Rule would not work, it was not the fault of the Rule,
-but because one did not quite know how to work it? I have no intention
-of setting down the failures or the little successes of four terms as
-mayor. Nor shall I write a little history of those terms in office;
-I could not, and it would not be worth while if I could. I shall not
-attempt in these pages a treatise on municipal government, for if the
-task were rightly executed, it would be a history of civilization.
-Non-partizanship in municipal elections, municipal ownership, home
-rule for cities,--who is interested in these? I have discussed them
-in interviews--(“Is there to be a statement for us this morning, Mr.
-Mayor?”)--and speeches numerous as autumn leaves, and like them, lost
-now in the winds to which they were given.
-
-After all, it is life in which we are all interested. And one sees a
-deal of life in a mayor’s office, and in it one may learn to envisage
-it as--just life. Then one can have a philosophy about it, though one
-cannot discover a panacea, some sort of sociological patent medicine
-to be administered to the community, like Socialism, or Prohibition,
-or absolute law enforcement, or the commission form of government. One
-indeed may open one’s eyes and look at one’s city and presently behold
-its vast antitheses, its boulevards and marble palaces at one end, and
-its slums, its tenements and tenderloins at the other. He may discern
-there the operations of universal and inexorable laws, and realize the
-tremendous conflict that everywhere and in all times goes on between
-privilege and the people. Such a view may simplify life for him; it may
-make easy the peroration to the campaign speech; it may provide a glib
-and facile answer to any question. But he should have a care lest it
-make him the slave of its own _clichés_, as Socialists for instance,
-when they become purely scientific, explain every human impulse,
-emotion and deed by simply repeating the formula “Economic determinism.”
-
-But it will not do; it will not suffice. This view of life is simple
-only because it is narrow and confined; in far perspectives there
-appear curious and perplexing contradictions. And even then, the most
-exhaustive analysis of life and of human society, however immense and
-comprehensive, however logical and inevitable its generalizations, must
-always fall short simply because no human mind and no assembly of human
-minds can ever wholly envisage the vast and bewildering complexity
-of human life. Each man views life from that angle where he happens
-to have been placed by forces he cannot comprehend. All of which no
-doubt is a mere repetition in feebler terms of what has heretofore
-been spoken of the inherent vice of the sectarian mind. There are no
-rigid distinctions of good and bad, of proletarians and capitalists, of
-privileged and proscribed; there are just people, just folks, as Jones
-said, with their human weaknesses, follies, and mistakes, their petty
-ambitions, their miserable jealousies and envies, their triumphs, and
-glories and boundless dreams, and all tending somewhither, they know
-not where nor how, and all pretty much alike. And government, be its
-form what it may, is but the reflection of all these qualities. The
-city, said Coriolanus, is the people, and as Jones used to say, with
-those strange embracing gestures, “I believe in _all_ the people.”
-
-
-
-
-XXXVIII
-
-
-However, all these confused elements make the task of a mayor
-exceedingly difficult, especially in America where there are, not so
-many kinds of people, but so many different standards and customs and
-habits. When one gets down into humanity, one beholds not two classes,
-separate and distinct as the sexes, but innumerable classes. In Toledo
-something more than twenty languages and dialects are spoken every
-day, and as the mayor is addressed the chorus becomes a very babel,
-a confusion of tongues, all counseling him to his duty. The result
-is apt to be perplexing at times. The rights of “business” in the
-streets and to the public property, the proper bounds within which
-strikers and strike breakers are to be confined, the limitations of the
-activities of pickets, the hours in which it is proper to drink beer,
-who in the community should gamble, whether Irishmen or Germans make
-the better policemen; the exact proportion of public jobs which Poles
-and Hungarians should hold; whether Socialists on their soap boxes are
-obstructing traffic or merely exercising the constitutional right of
-free speech, whether there are more Catholics than Protestants holding
-office; whether the East Side is receiving its due consideration in
-comparison with the West Side; whether boys have the right to play ball
-in the streets, and lovers to spoon in parks, and whose conceptions of
-morals is to prevail--these, like the sins of the Psalmist, are ever
-before him.
-
-And with it all there is a strange, inexplicable belief in the almost
-supernatural power of a mayor. I have been waited on by committees--of
-aged men--demanding that I stop at once those lovers who sought the
-public park on moonlit nights in June, I have been roused from bed
-at two o’clock in the morning, with a demand that a team of horses
-in a barn four miles on the other side of town be fed; innumerable
-ladies have appealed to me to compel their husbands to show them
-more affectionate attention, others have asked me to prohibit their
-neighbors from talking about them. One Jewish resident was so devout
-that he emigrated to Jerusalem, and his family insisted that I recall
-him; a Christian missionary asked me to detail policemen to assist
-him in converting the Jews to his creed; and pathetic mothers were
-ever imploring me to order the release of their sons and husbands from
-prisons and penitentiaries, over which I had no possible jurisdiction.
-I have recalled I know not how many times a remark Jones made one
-evening after one of those weary days I afterward came to know so well;
-“I could wash my hands every day in women’s tears.”
-
-Of course, the main thing was not to wash one’s hands of them or their
-difficulties. I remember one poor soul whose husband was in the
-penitentiary. She came to me in a despair that was almost frantic, and
-showed me a letter she had received from her husband. A new governor
-had been elected in that state wherein he was imprisoned, and he urged
-his wife, in the letter she gave me to read, to secure a pardon for him
-before the new governor was inaugurated. “They say,” he wrote, “that
-the new governor is a good church member, which is a bad sign for being
-good to prisoners.”
-
-Poor soul! It was impossible to explain to her that I was wholly
-powerless. She stood and humbly shook her sorrowful head, and to each
-new attempt at explanation she said:
-
-“You are the father of all.”
-
-It was a phrase which most of the women of the foreign born population
-employed; they repeated it as though it were some charmed formula.
-This exaggerated notion of the mayoral power was not confined to
-those citizens of the foreign quarters; it was shared by many of the
-native Americans, who held the mayor responsible for all the vices of
-the community, and I was never more sharply criticized than when, in
-refusing to sanction the enactment of a curfew ordinance, I tentatively
-advanced the suggestion that, if it did not seem too outrageously
-radical, the rearing and training of children was the duty, not so much
-of the police as of parents, pastors and teachers.
-
-It may have been because, in some way, it had got abroad that I was
-a reformer myself. It was at a time when there was new and searching
-inquiry, and a new sense of public decency, the result of a profound
-impulse in the public consciousness, and I had been of those who in
-my town had opposed the political machines. Constructive thinking and
-constructive work being the hardest task in the world, one of which
-our democracy in its present development is not yet fully capable, the
-impulse spent itself largely in destructive work. That was natural;
-it is a quality inherent in humanity. My friend Kermode F. Gill, the
-artist-builder and contractor of Cleveland, once told me that while
-it is difficult to get men to carry on any large construction, and
-carry it on well, and necessary to set task masters over them to have
-the work done at all, there is a wholly different spirit in evidence
-when the work is one of demolition. If a great building is to be torn
-down, the men need no task masters, no speeding up, they fly at it in a
-perfect frenzy, with a veritable passion, and tear it down so swiftly
-that the one difficulty is to get the salvage. And in the course of
-building public works I have observed the same phenomenon. While the
-forces are tearing down, while they are excavating, that black fringe
-of spectators, the “crow line” the builders call it, is always there.
-But when once the work is above ground, and construction begins, when
-the structure lifts itself, when it aspires,--the crow line dissolves
-and melts quite away. This, in a sense, is true of man in any of his
-operations. When the great awakening came, after the first shock of
-surprise, after the first resolve to do better, the public went at the
-work of demolition, all about the arena the thumbs of the multitude
-were turned down, and we witnessed the tragedy of men who but a short
-while before had been praised and lauded for their possessions, and
-used as models for little boys in Sunday-school, suddenly stripped of
-all their coveted garments, and held up to the hatred and ridicule
-of a world that can yet think of nothing better than the stocks, the
-pillory, the jail, and the scaffold.
-
-In Edinburgh I was shown a little church of which Sir Walter Scott was
-once a vestryman, or deacon or elder or some such official, and in the
-door still hung the irons in which offenders were fastened on Sunday
-mornings so that the righteous, as they went to pray, might comfort
-themselves with a consoling sense of their own goodness by spitting in
-the face of the sinner. Many of our reforms are still carried on in
-this spirit, and are no more sensible or productive of good.
-
-The word “reformer,” like the word “politician” has degenerated,
-and, in the mind of the common man, come to connote something very
-disagreeable. In four terms as mayor I came to know both species
-pretty well, and, in the later connotations of the term, I prefer the
-politician. He, at least, is human. The reformers, as Emerson said,
-affect one as the insane do; their motives may be pious, but their
-methods are profane. They are a buzz in the ear.
-
-I had read this in Emerson in my youth, when for a long time I had
-a veritable passion for him, just as in a former stage, and another
-mood, I had had a veritable passion for books about Napoleon, and, at
-another, for the works of Carlyle, and the controversy excited by the
-reckless Froude; but the truth--as it appears to me, or at any rate,
-the part of a truth--was not borne in upon me until I came to know and
-to regard, with dread, the possibility that I might be included in
-their number, which I should not like, unless it were as a mere brother
-in humanity, somewhat estranged in spirit though we should be.
-
-
-
-
-XXXIX
-
-
-The disadvantages of being classed as a reformer are not, I am sure,
-sufficiently appreciated; if they were the peace of the world would
-not be troubled as constantly as it is by those who would make mankind
-over on a model of which they present themselves as the unattractive
-example. One of those advantages is that each reformer thinks that all
-the other reformers are in honor committed to his reform; he writes
-them letters asking for expressions of sympathy and support, and,
-generally, when he finds that each of the others has some darling
-reform of his own which he is determined to try on an unwilling public,
-he is at once denounced as a traitor to the whole scheme of reform
-in the universe. Another disadvantage is that reformers never are
-reëlected, and I might set forth others, were it my intention to embark
-on that interesting subject.
-
-I am moved to these observations, however, by the recollection of an
-experience, exasperating at the time, though now of no moment, since
-it has cured itself as will most exasperations if left long enough
-to themselves. Its importance, if it have any importance at all, may
-be ascribed to its effect of having saved me from any such fatal
-classification, unless I were far enough away from home, where almost
-anyone may be regarded as a reformer. To be sure, as I was just saying,
-in the days immediately following my first election, I was regarded
-by many of the sacred and illuminated host of reformers in the land
-as one of them, since I was asked to join in all sorts of movements
-for all sorts of prohibitions,--of the use of intoxicating liquors
-and tobacco and cigarettes, and I know not what other vices abhorred
-by those who are not addicted to them,--but it was my good luck, as
-it seems now to have been, to be saved from that fate by as good and
-faithful an enemy as ever helped a politician along. The Democrats had
-been placed in power that year in Ohio, and with Tom Johnson, many of
-us felt that it was an opportunity to secure certain changes in the
-laws of Ohio relating to the government of cities, that is, we felt
-it was time to secure our own reforms; everyone else, of course, felt
-the same way about his reforms. We had organized late in the previous
-year an association of the mayors of the cities in the state for the
-purpose of making changes in the municipal code that would give the
-cities a more mobile form of government and greater powers, in other
-words, it was the first definite movement in favor of home rule for
-cities, a liberation for which we struggled for almost a decade before
-we achieved any measure of success. We had drafted a new municipal
-code and had met at Columbus early in that January in which I took my
-office, to put the finishing touches to our code before presenting it
-to the legislature, and one morning I strolled into the hall of the
-House of Representatives before the daily session had been convened.
-
-There was in the House at that time a newly elected member whom Johnson
-had supported for election and no sooner was he in his seat than he
-opposed every measure Johnson espoused, and, under the warming applause
-his disloyalty won from Johnson’s enemies, he became an opponent of
-the mayor more vociferous than effective. He was exactly, I think, of
-that type described by Emerson, who in the course of saying everything
-worth saying, or that will be worth saying for the next two hundred
-years, said: “Republics abound in young civilians who believe that
-the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and
-modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce,
-education and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure,
-though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get
-sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish
-legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that
-the state must follow and not lead the character and progress of the
-citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only
-who build on Ideas build for eternity; and that the form of government
-which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the
-population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are
-superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat; so much life as it has
-in the character of living men is its force.”
-
-I knew this young civilian then only as one of the Johnson group and
-as that was sufficient introduction, in the _camaraderie_ that existed
-between those of us who were devoted to the same cause, I stopped, at
-his salutation, and chatted with him for a moment. He had asked my
-opinion on a bill he had introduced, a measure to prohibit or regulate
-public dances in cities, or some such thing, and when I failed to
-evince the due degree of interest in the young man’s measure, he was at
-once displeased and tried to heat me to the proper degree of warmth in
-the holy cause of reform. He began, of course, by an indignant demand
-to know if I was in favor of the evils that were connected with public
-dances, and when I tried to show him that my inability to recognize his
-measure as the only adequate method of dealing with those evils did
-not necessarily indicate approval of them, he struck the prescribed
-attitude, held up his right hand and said something in the melodramatic
-style, about the oath of office I had taken not many days before. I saw
-at once then that I was dealing with a member in high standing of the
-order of the indurated sectarian mind, whose fanaticism makes them the
-most impossible persons in the world, and having never been certain
-which of the advice in the Proverbs should be accepted, I yielded to a
-fatal habit of joking--the history of the Republic is strewn with the
-wrecks of careers that were broken by a jest--and told him that I had
-taken my oath of office before a notary public, and that perhaps it had
-not been of full efficacy on that account.
-
-And then I went away, and forgot the incident. It was revived in my
-memory, however, and intensified in its interest for me the next
-morning, when on getting back home, I saw in the newspapers a despatch
-from Columbus, under the most ominous of black headlines, stating that
-I had told the distinguished representative, on the very floor of the
-House, under the aegis, one almost might say, of the state, that I had
-no reverence for my oath of office, and did not intend to respect it.
-Here was anarchy for you, indeed, from the old pupil of Altgeld!
-
-It was, of course, useless to explain, since any statement I might make
-would be but one more welcome knot to the tangle of misrepresentation
-in which the unhappy incident was being so gladly snarled, and I tried
-to forget it, though that was impossible, since it provided the text
-for many a sanctimonious editorial in the land, in each one of which
-some addition was made to the original report. Herbert Spencer says
-somewhere that for every story told in the world there is some basis
-of truth, and I suppose he is right, but I have always felt that he
-did not, at least in my reading of him, sufficiently characterize
-that worst vice of the human mind, intellectual dishonesty. Perhaps
-if he had associated less with scientists and more with professional
-reformers of the morals of other persons he would not have omitted this
-curious specimen from his philosophic analysis, if he did omit it;
-and if that experience of the young civilian at Columbus had not been
-sufficient, I could have supplied him with another out of an episode in
-which I had borne a part some years before, one which should have been
-sufficient to warn me against the type for the rest of my life.
-
-It concerns another young civilian, though this one was so old that
-he should have known better, and relates to a time years before when
-I happened to be running for the state senate. I say happened, for it
-was precisely of that fortuitous nature, since I had not been concerned
-in the circumstances which nominated me, so entirely negative in their
-character that I might as well have been said not to be running at
-all. I was a young lawyer, just beginning to practice, and in my wide
-leisure was out of town that summer, economically spending a holiday at
-my father’s house, and, since the Democrats had no hope in this world
-of carrying the district, and could get no one who was on the ground to
-defend himself to accept their nomination, they had nominated me. It
-was an honor, perhaps, but so empty and futile that when I came home
-again it seemed useless even to decline it, and best to forget it, and
-so I tried to do that, and made no campaign at all. But one afternoon
-I had a caller, a tall, dark visaged man, in black clerical garb, who
-came softly into my office, carefully closed the door, and, fixing
-his strange, intense eyes on me, said that he came to talk politics.
-He represented a reform league and he came, he said, to discuss my
-candidature for the state senate, and to offer me the support of his
-organization. “Of course,” he went on to explain, “we should impose
-certain conditions.” He fixed on me again and very intently, those
-strange, fanatic eyes.
-
-I knew very well what the conditions were; it was hardly necessary for
-him to explain that I should be expected to sign a pledge to support
-the bills proposed by his organization, some of which, no doubt, were
-excellent measures.
-
-I explained to him that I was under no illusions as to the campaign,
-that there was no possible chance of my election that year, that if
-there had been I never would have been nominated, and nothing short
-of a miracle could elect me. “But,” I added, “even if that miracle
-happens, though it will not, and I should be elected, I should go down
-to Columbus and to the Senate able to say that I had made no promises
-whatever.”
-
-He looked at me a moment, with those strange, cold eyes peering
-narrowly out of his somber visage, and as he gazed they seemed to
-contract, and with the faint shadow of a smile that was wholly without
-humor, he said:
-
-“Well, you can say that.”
-
-“What do you mean?” I asked.
-
-The smile raised the man’s cheeks a little higher until they enclosed
-the little eyes in minute wrinkles, and invested them with an
-expression of the deepest cunning.
-
-“Why, since you are opposed to signing our pledge, we will waive that
-in your case, and you and I can have a little private understanding--no
-one need ever know, and you can say----” he was gently tapping the ends
-of his fingers together, and the last terms of his proposal seemed to
-be absorbed by an expression of vulpine significance so eloquent and
-plain in its meaning that mere words were superfluous.
-
-I sat there and looked at him; I had known of him, he spoke nearly
-every Sunday in some church, and took up collections for the reform to
-which, quite sincerely, I believe, he was devoting his life. Then I
-said:
-
-“But that isn’t my idea even of politics, to say nothing of ethics.”
-
-I believe now that he had no conception of the moral significance of
-his suggestion that we have an implied understanding which I was to
-be at liberty to deny if the exigencies of politics suggested it. He
-was a reformer, belonging to the order of the indurated mind. He was
-possessed by a theory, which held his mind in the relentless mould of
-its absolutism, and there his mind had hardened, and, alas, his heart,
-too, no doubt--so that its original impressions were all fixed and
-immutable, and not subject to change; they could not be erased nor
-could any new impressions be superimposed. He was convinced that his
-particular theory was correct, and that if only it could be imposed on
-mankind, the world would be infinitely better off; and that hence any
-means, no matter what, were permissible in effecting this imposition,
-because of the good that would follow. It is an old mental attitude in
-this world, well treated of in books, and understood and recognized by
-everyone except those who adopt it, and in its spirit every new reform
-is promulgated by its avatar. But the reformer never thinks of himself
-in any such light, of course, he does not understand it any more than
-he understands mankind’s distrust of him. It is the instinctive fear of
-the theorist that has been felt for every one of them from Robespierre,
-the archtype, and impossibilist par excellence, down to the latest man
-haranguing his little idle crowd on the street corner.
-
-
-
-
-XL
-
-
-These observations come with the recollection of those days of my first
-term in the mayor’s office when I had so much to do with reformers
-that I earnestly desired that no one would ever include me in their
-category. They came to see me so often and in such numbers that my
-whole view of life was quite in danger of distortion. It seemed that
-half the populace had set forth in a rage to reform mankind, and their
-first need was to get the mayor to use the police force to help them.
-When they did not call at the office, they were writing letters. The
-favorite day for these expressions of the reforming spirit was Monday.
-I had been many months in the office however, before I was able to make
-this generalization, though from the first I could observe that Monday
-took on something of that dismal and somber tone which has given it
-its name of blue Monday. In the early days of a simpler life in our
-country, when the customs of the pioneer had not been superseded by the
-complexities of modern existence, its color used to be ascribed to the
-fact that it was wash day, and perhaps it has remained a sort of moral
-wash day ever since. At any rate we soon discovered that everyone who
-had a grievance or a complaint or a suggestion about his neighbor or
-some larger scheme of reforming whole groups of the population was most
-likely to be heavily charged with it on Monday, and since the almost
-universal conception among us is that all reforms can be wrought by the
-mayor, by the simple process of issuing an order to the police, these
-complaints were of course lodged at the mayor’s office.
-
-They were of a curious variety, expressing, I suppose, not only all
-the moral yearnings of mankind, but all the meaner moods of human
-nature, and each new Monday morning seemed to have in reserve, for a
-nature that was trying to keep its faith in humanity, some fresh and
-theretofore unimagined instance of the depths of little meannesses to
-which human nature is capable of sinking. Many of them came in person
-with their criticism, others sent anonymous letters. Then there were
-those who came to repeat ugly things they had heard about me; “I
-wouldn’t tell you this if I were not your friend. I think you ought
-to know it.” Later in the afternoon the evenings’ newspapers, with
-the criticisms marked, were laid on my desk. All this made Monday
-the hardest day of the week, especially as the day closed with the
-hebdominal session of the council, where one might find now and then
-some pretty discouraging examples of human meanness. Tuesday was not
-quite so bad, though it was trying; human nature seemed to run pretty
-high, or pretty low, on that day, too. By Wednesday, the atmosphere
-began to clear, and by Thursday and Friday, everyone seemed to be
-attending to his own business and letting the faults of his neighbors
-go unnoted or at least unreported, and Saturday was a day of such calm
-that one’s whole faith in humanity was miraculously restored; if the
-weather was fine one might almost discover human nature as to be good
-as that nature which would reveal herself on the golf links.
-
-As a result of it all we finally made the deduction--my secretary
-Bernard Dailey, the stenographers in the office and the reporters who
-formed so pleasant an element of the life there--that it was all due
-to the effects of the Sunday that had intervened. In the first place,
-people had leisure on that day and in that leisure they could whet up
-their consciences and set them to the congenial task of dissecting the
-characters of other people, or they could contemplate the evils in the
-world and resolve highly to make the mayor do away with them, and then
-after the custom of our land they could gorge on the huge Sunday noon
-dinner of roast beef, and then lie about all afternoon like pythons in
-a torpor which produced an indigestion so acute and lasting that for
-three days it passed very well for pious fervor and zeal for reform.
-Such at least was our theory, offered here solely in the scientific
-spirit, and not by any means as final. It was acquiesced in by all of
-us at the time, and has been supported by an unvarying series of data
-on the Monday mornings since then.
-
-We submitted it to Henry Frisch, the police sergeant who had been
-detailed for duty in the mayor’s office for many years, a dear and
-comfortable soul, who had served under several mayors, and had
-developed a philosophy of life that was a very Nirvana of comfort
-and repose. Long ago, so it seemed when he smiled indulgently on the
-discomfiture of blue Monday, he had given up humanity as a bad job; to
-him the race was utterly and irredeemably hopeless, and without the
-need of saying a word he could shake his honest head at the suggestion
-of a new reform with a motion that was eloquent of all negation. He was
-very tolerant, however, and made no argument in rebuttal, he simply
-refused to accept humanity on any general plane; regarding the race as
-a biological species merely, he would confide to you that his years of
-experience at that post and as a policeman who had paced his beat and
-afterward commanded a sergeant’s squad, had convinced him that it was
-altogether depraved, dishonest and disgusting, but with any individual
-specimen of the species he was not that way at all. He was really
-kindness itself. The next minute, with tears in his eyes, he would go
-to any extremes to help some poor devil out of trouble. Unless it were
-reformers; for these he had no use, he said, and if his advice had been
-accepted he would have been permitted to expel them from the City Hall
-by their own beloved weapons of violence and force of arms. On Sundays
-he went fishing.
-
-Perhaps at the time of which I am thinking, if not very specifically
-writing, there was more of this Monday spirit of reform than is
-usual. In the first place, much is expected of a new official and
-because he does not promptly work those miracles which are confidently
-expected whether he was foolish enough to promise them or not, he is
-so generally complained of that it may be set down as an axiom of
-practical politics that any elected official, in the executive branch
-of the government, could be recalled at any time during the first year
-of his incumbency of his office. Just then, too, there had been elected
-to the governorship a gentleman who had been very deeply devoted to
-the interests of the Methodist Church, the strongest denomination
-numerically in Ohio--the first governor of Ohio, indeed, was a
-Methodist preacher--and because of that fact and because of the use in
-his inaugural message of the magic phrase “law and order,” it was at
-once announced in the most sensational manner of the sensational press
-that, unless all the sumptuary laws in Ohio were drastically enforced,
-all the mayors of the cities would be removed. Governor Pattison had
-been elected as a Democrat, and during his campaign Tom Johnson and
-I had supported him, and it was while we were in Columbus at his
-inauguration that this sensation was exploited in the newspapers. I
-remember how Tom Johnson received it when one of his coterie brought
-the extra editions into the hotel and pointed out to him the dreadful
-predictions of the headlines; the white, aristocratic hand waved the
-suggestion imperiously aside, and he said:
-
-“Four days, and it’ll all be over. That’s the life of a newspaper
-sensation.”
-
-I believe that newspaper editors themselves place the limit of the
-effectiveness of a sensation at about that time, though some of them
-are so shrewd that they drop the sensation the day before the people
-begin to lose interest in it, instead of waiting for the day on which
-they actually tire of it. Which may be an explanation of the fact that
-the beginnings of things are always treated so much more fully in the
-press than their endings; one always reads of the opening of the trial,
-and the awful charge, but is never told how it all came out in the end,
-unless the end was catastrophic. The theory of the press is, I believe,
-that good news is no news.
-
-I do not know that poor Governor Pattison ever had any intention of
-raising the issue of local self-government, and of raising it in such
-a direct and positive way as by attempting to remove all the mayors
-of Ohio towns and cities in which it could be shown that some little
-enactment of the legislature had failed of absolute enforcement; I
-suppose he had no such intention, since the law gave him no such power,
-though that made no difference to the professional reverencers and
-enforcers of law. The poor man never saw the governor’s office after
-that night of his brilliant inauguration, when he stood, very dark and
-weary, with features drawn, but resolutely smiling, at his levee in the
-senate chamber, a tragic figure in a way, the first Democratic governor
-in a long while, and the fates treating him with their customary irony
-and indignity by setting their seal upon him in the very hour of his
-triumph. He died in a few months, but there remained many of course who
-could prophesy in his name and cast out devils with each extra edition
-of the newspapers, and the discussion of law enforcement has gone on
-pretty steadily from that time to this.
-
-
-
-
-XLI
-
-
-I suppose the discussion is one which must go on always in any land
-where the people of our race and tradition dwell. A more objective,
-natural and naïve people would not be so interested in sin, and
-when the late Mayor Gaynor of New York spoke of the difficulty of
-administering the affairs of a modern city according to “the standard
-of exquisite morals” held aloft by some persons for others, he
-designated in his clear and clever way a class of citizens familiar to
-every mayor by the curiously doctrinaire order of indurated mind with
-which they are endowed. They begin with the naïve assumption that their
-standard is the one and only correct standard, and that since men have
-repeatedly refused to adopt it on mere inspection they must be forced
-to do so by the use of violence, a process which they call maintaining
-“law and order.” They believe that any wrong, any abuse, may be stopped
-instantly by the passage of a law, and if one venture to question the
-efficacy of any plan they propose, he is said at once to be opposed to
-morality and to religion, and is set down as a profane and sacrilegious
-person.
-
-It is, of course, inconvenient to argue with a person who has the
-supreme refuge of the irrelevant conclusion; as inconvenient as it
-would be were one to be offered carbolic acid as a toilet article,
-and, upon refusal, be accused of not believing in cleanliness. This
-order of mind imagines that every phase of human conduct can be ordered
-and regulated by the enactment of statutes; that the industries,
-occupations, clothing, amusements, appetites, passions, prejudices,
-opinions, ambitions, aspirations and devotions of man can be changed,
-moulded and regulated by city councils and state legislatures. Every
-inconvenience, every difficulty, every disagreeable feature of modern
-life, is to be done away by the passage of a law.
-
-That our race is saturated with this curious and amazing superstition
-of the power of written enactments is shown by the common terminology.
-The mental reactions of a large portion of mankind against the
-irritation of opposing opinion and conduct habitually express
-themselves in the phrase, “There ought to be a law.” It is heard as
-often every day as the stereotyped references to the weather. Not a
-disagreeable incident in life is complained of without that expression;
-no one has a pet aversion or a darling prejudice that he does not
-cherish the desire of having a law passed to bring the rest of the
-world around to his way of feeling. And when a trust is formed, or a
-strike interrupts business, or the sheets on the hotel bed are too
-short, or the hatpin of a woman in a crowded street car is too long,
-or a new dance is introduced, or a boor preëmpts a seat in a train,
-or a cat howls on the back-yard fence in the night time, or a waiter
-is impertinent, or the cook leaves, the indignant citizen lifts his
-eyes hopefully toward that annual calamity known as the session of the
-state legislature, and repeats the formula: “There ought to be a law.”
-And when the legislature assembles, a whole body of foolish bills is
-introduced regulating everything in the earth, and some things that
-are outside of the earth. If a deed is disapproved of by a group of
-people, an agitation is begun to make it a criminal offense; by means
-of pains and penalties the whole of life is to be regulated, and
-government is to become a vast bureaucracy of policemen, catch-polls,
-inspectors, beadles, censors, mentors, monitors and spies. As the
-session draws toward its close, the haste to enact all these measures
-becomes frantic. I shall never forget those scenes of riot, the howling
-and drunkenness and confusion and worse I have witnessed in the
-legislatures of Illinois and of Ohio the last night of the session.
-And all this delirium goes on in every state of the Union, every
-winter--and all these enactments must be revered. It is the phase of
-the apotheosis of the policeman, who is to replace nurse and parent and
-teacher and pastor, and, relieving all these of their responsibilities,
-undertake to remould man into a being of absolute perfection, in whom
-character may be dispensed with, since he is to dwell forever under
-the crystal dome of a moral vacuum from which temptation has been
-scientifically exhausted.
-
-The reason is simple, and obvious; it inheres in the belief in the
-absolute. Your true reformer is not only without humor, without pity,
-without mercy, but he is without knowledge of life or of human nature,
-and without very much of any sort of sweetness and light. The more
-moral he is, the harder he is, and the more amazingly ready with cruel
-judgments; and he seldom smiles except with the unction that comes
-with the thought of his own moral superiority. He thinks there is an
-absolute good and an absolute bad, and hence absolutely good people and
-absolutely bad people.
-
-The peculiar and distinguishing feature of his mind is that life is
-presented to it in stark and rigid outline. He is blandly unconscious
-of distinctions; he has no perception of proportions, no knowledge of
-values, in a word, no sense of humor. His world is made up of wholly
-unrelated antitheses. There are no shades or shadows, no gradations,
-no delicate and subtle relativities. A thing is either black or white,
-good or bad. A deed is either moral or immoral, a virtue or a crime.
-It is all very simple. All acts of which he does not himself approve
-are evil; all who do not think and act as he thinks and acts, are bad.
-If you do not know when a deed, or an opinion is wrong, he will tell
-you; and if you doubt him or differ with him, you are bad, and it is
-time to call in the police. “Whenever the Commons has nothing else
-to do,” said the wise old member of Parliament, “it can always make
-a new crime.” Statutes are thus enacted, as the saying is, against
-all evils, great and small, and the greater the evil, of course, the
-greater the moral triumph expressed by the mere enactment. But because
-of certain contrarieties in nature and a certain obstreperous quality
-in human nature and a general complexity in life as a whole these legal
-fulminations are frequently triumphs only in theory, and in practice
-often intensify the very ills they seek to cure. As the witty Remy de
-Gourmont says: _Quand la morale triomphe il se passes des choses très
-vilaines._
-
-The more intensively developed specimen of the type will not overtly
-sin himself, but he loves to inspect those who do, and to peer at
-them, and to wonder how they could ever have the courage to do it; he
-likes to imagine their sensations, and to note each one of them as it
-was developed in the interesting experience. And hence the psychic
-lasciviousness of those who are constantly reporting plays and pictures
-as fit for the censor they are always clamoring for. Sometimes they
-go slumming as students of the evils of society. They are like pious
-uncles who never swear themselves under any circumstances, but relate
-stories of other men who do, recite their delightful experiences and
-roll out the awful oaths with which the profane gave vent to their
-feelings with a relish that is no doubt a relief to their own.
-
-It is, I suppose, our inheritance from the Puritans, or the worst of
-our inheritance from the Puritans, and it is possible that it is worth
-while to have paid the penalty as a price for the best we derived from
-them, since one has to take the bad with the good, though in those
-days I often wished that the bequest had gone to some other of the
-heirs. Perhaps in thus speaking of the good we had from them, I am
-merely yielding to the fear of saying openly what I have often thought,
-namely, that the good we had from the Puritans has been immensely
-overestimated and exaggerated, and is not one whit better or greater
-in quantity or influence than that we had from the Cavaliers, or for
-that matter from the latest emigrant on Ellis Island. They themselves
-appreciated their own goodness, and we have always taken their words
-for granted. I have often thought that some day, when I had the elegant
-leisure necessary to such a task, I should like to write “A History of
-Puritanism,” or, since I should have to place the beginnings of the
-monumental work in Rome as far back at least as the reign of the first
-Emperor, perhaps I should be less ambitious and content myself with
-writing “A History of Puritanism in the United States of America.” I
-should have to begin the larger work at that interesting period of
-the history of Rome when the weary Augustus was being elected and
-reëlected president against his will and trying to gratify the spirit
-of Puritanism that was even in such people as those Romans, by enacting
-all sorts of sumptuary laws and foolish prohibitions, and trying out to
-miserable failures every single one of the proposals that have since
-that time been made over and over again in the hope of regenerating
-mankind. The story of how the Emperor’s own daughter was almost the
-first to disobey his regulations is dramatic enough to conclude rather
-than to begin any history, and yet I could write it with much more
-pity than I could the story of those Puritans who abounded in my own
-locality in my own time. To write fairly and philosophically of them
-I should have to wait not only for a leisure so large and so elegant
-that I am certain never to have it, but I should have to cultivate a
-philosophic calm which I own with shame is far from me when I think
-of some of the things they, or some of them, did in their efforts to
-force their theories on others. I should not recall such things now,
-and if I were to put them in that monumental and scholarly work of
-my imagination, it should be, of course, only in the cold scientific
-spirit, and as specimens, say in nonpariel type, at the foot of the
-page with the learned annotations.
-
-
-
-
-XLII
-
-
-Speaking of this passion for laws and regulations and how some of the
-zealous would order even the most private and personal details of life
-in these states, Mr. Havelock Ellis, in a brilliant chapter of his
-work, “The Task of Social Hygiene,” takes occasion to observe that
-“nowhere in the world is there so great an anxiety to place the moral
-regulation of social affairs in the hands of police,” and that “nowhere
-are the police more incapable of carrying out such regulation.” The
-difficulty is due of course to the fact that the old medieval confusion
-of crime and vice persists in a community where the Puritan tradition
-still strongly survives. The incapability, as has been pointed out, is
-not so much in the policemen as in that _bêtisse humaine_ which expects
-such superhuman work of them.
-
-This insistent confusion of vice with crime has not only had the effect
-of fostering both, but is the cause of the corruption of the police.
-Their proper function is to protect life and property and maintain the
-public peace, and this the police of American cities perform as well
-as policemen anywhere. But when, by a trick of the sectarian mind, the
-term _crime_ is made to include all the follies and weaknesses and
-vices of humanity, where there is added the duty of enforcing statutes
-against a multitude of acts, some of which only Puritanical severity
-classes as crimes, others of which are regarded by the human beings in
-the community with indifference, tolerance or sympathy, while still
-others are inherent in mysterious and imperative instincts which balk
-all efforts at general control, the task becomes wholly impossible and
-beyond human ability.
-
-The police know it, and everybody knows it, and it is the hypocrisy of
-society that corrupts them. The police know, intuitively, and without
-any process of ratiocination, that people are human, and subject to
-human frailties; they are pretty human themselves, and, in common
-with most of the people in the community, see no great wrong in some
-of the things that are done which the sumptuary laws condemn. Most
-of them, for instance, drink a glass of beer now and then, or play a
-game of cards, or go to a baseball game on Sunday. They are not apt
-to be gentlemen of the most refined and exquisite tastes. And it is
-difficult to induce men to take much interest in punishing acts their
-own consciences do not condemn. This, with the situation at its best;
-at its worst, knowing that, despite all the enactments of legislatures,
-people will continue in their hardened ways, they are apt to abuse
-their power. For they know, too, that the statutes prohibiting the
-merely venial of those acts oftentimes run counter to the urban custom
-and that the community regards it as of no great consequence if they
-are not enforced. Thus a wide discretion is permitted the police by the
-public conscience in the discharge of their duties, and this discretion
-is one which quite humanly they proceed to abuse. If they choose, they
-may enforce the sumptuary laws against certain persons or refrain
-from doing so, and the opportunity for corruption is presented. The
-opportunity widens, opens into a larger field, and not only does the
-corruption spread, but it is not long before the police are employing
-extra legal methods in other directions, and at last in many instances
-establish an actual tyranny that would not be tolerated in a monarchy.
-The result is that we read every day of arbitrary interferences by
-policemen with most of the constitutional rights, such as free speech,
-the right of assembly and petition, etc. They even set up a censorship
-and condemn paintings, or prohibit the performance of plays, or assume
-to banish women from the streets because they are dressed in a style
-which the police do not consider _comme il faut_.
-
-And while the corruption is deplored and everywhere causes indignation
-and despair, this tyranny does not seem to excite resistance or even
-remark; the press, the paladium of our liberties, does not often
-protest against it, and few seem to have sufficient grasp of the
-principle to care anything about it.
-
-There is a story somewhere of a little girl, homeless, supperless,
-shivering in rags in the cold rain of the streets of New York, and of a
-passer-by observing in a kind of sardonic sympathy:
-
-“And she is living under the protection of sixteen thousand laws!”
-
-“Ah, yes,” said his friend, perhaps a professional reformer of third
-persons, who naturally lacked a sense of humor; “but they were not
-enforced!”
-
-It is not altogether inconceivable that if all the laws had been
-enforced the little girl’s condition would have been even worse than it
-was, considering how haphazard had been the process of making all those
-laws, and how, if set in motion, many of them would have clashed with
-each other.
-
-If they were effective, the whole of human kind would have been
-translated, like Enoch, long ago. Of course, the assertion that they
-had not been enforced was the obvious retort. And it was true, because
-it is impossible to enforce all of them. And what is more no one
-believes that all the laws should be enforced, all the time,--that is,
-no one believes in absolute law enforcement, since no one believes that
-the laws should be enforced against _him_. Everybody hates a policeman
-just as everybody loves a fireman. And yet the fire department and the
-police department are composed of the same kind of men, paid the same
-salaries, and responsible to the same authorities. The duty of the
-fireman is, of course, the simpler, because there is no disagreement
-among men about the thing to be done. When a fire breaks out in the
-city, the fire department is expected to rush to the spot, to pour
-water on the fire, and to continue pouring water on the fire until it
-ceases to burn. The reforming mind seems to think that the duty of the
-policeman is of equal simplicity, and that when a wrong is done, the
-sole duty of the police consists in rushing immediately to that spot,
-seizing the wrongdoer, and, by confining him in a prison, thereby
-eradicate his tendency to do wrong, and, by holding him up as an
-example to others who are considering the commission of that wrong, to
-deter them from it.
-
-As far as crimes are concerned, the policemen, indeed, do fairly well.
-Though that they succeed in any measure at all in discharging their
-functions is a wonder when one considers the contumely and abuse that
-are constantly heaped upon them in all our cities. The newspapers, when
-there are no accounts of crime to print--and the assumption is that
-crimes and casualties, if they are horrid enough, are the principal
-events in the annals of mankind worth chronicling--can always print
-suggestions of the crimes of the police. The reporter, a human being
-himself, dissatisfied because the policemen cannot gratify his hunger
-for sensation, is not to blame, perhaps; he views life from the
-standpoint of his own necessities, and his conception of life is of a
-series of exciting tragedies enacted with a view to making the first
-edition interesting, so that the ears of the populace may be assaulted
-in the gloom of each evening’s dusk by that hideous bellowing of the
-news “boy,” whose heavy voice booms through the shade like some mighty
-portent of disaster in the world.
-
-This all sounds pretty hopeless, but if morals are to be wrought by
-and through policemen, I am sure we shall have to pay higher salaries,
-and procure men who are themselves so moral that their consciences are
-troubled only by the sins of others; there is no other way. Unless,
-of course, anything is left in these modern days of the theory of the
-development of individual character. But that is the program of a
-thousand years.
-
-As for the future of municipal government in this land, I venture to
-set down this prediction: That no appreciable advance will be made, no
-appreciable advance can be made in any fundamental sense, so long as
-the so-called moral issue is the pivot on which municipal elections
-turn, or so long as it is allowed to remain to bedevil officials, to
-monopolize their time and to exhaust their energies, so that they have
-little of either left for their proper work of administration.
-
-Either cities must have home rule, including the local police power,
-with the right to regulate amusements and resorts and even vices
-according to the will of the people in that city, whatever the rural
-view may be, or some authority other than the mayor, and far wiser and
-nobler than any mayor I ever knew or heard of, must be raised up by
-the state in whom may be united the powers and functions of a beadle,
-a censor, and a dictator. I have not the slightest idea where one so
-wise and pure is to be found, but doubtless there are plenty who do, if
-their modesty would permit them to speak.
-
-
-
-
-XLIII
-
-
-I used to recall, during the early and acute phase of this discussion,
-an incident that occurred in the old Springfield days in Loami, down
-in the Sangamon country. The little village in those days could boast
-an institution unlike any, perhaps, in the land, unless it were to
-be found in some small hamlet in the South. In the public square, on
-a space worn smooth and hard as asphalt, a great circle was drawn,
-and here, every day when the weather was fine, a company of old
-men gathered and played marbles. What the game was I do not know;
-some development of one of the boys’ games, no doubt, but with what
-improvements and embellishments only the old men who understood and
-played it could say. Its enthralled votaries played with large marbles,
-which spun from their gnarled and horny knuckles all day long, with a
-shifting crowd of onlookers gaping at their prowess. The players were
-old and dignified, and took their sport seriously. There were to be
-seen, about that big ring, sages who had sat on juries and been swayed
-by the arguments of Lincoln; there were gray veterans who had gone with
-Sherman to the sea and had been with Grant at Appomattox; and now, in
-their declining years, they found pleasure and a mildly stimulating
-excitement in this exercise. The skill they developed in the game is
-said by those who have studied the subject on the ground to have been
-considerable; some testify that these elders had raised their sport to
-the point of scientific dignity, and that the ability they displayed
-ranked them as the equals of golfers or of billiardists.
-
-The exciting tournaments went on for years, the old gentlemen were
-happy, the little village was peaceful and contented, when suddenly
-the town was shocked by a new sensation. Loami elected a reform
-administration. How it came about I do not know; some local muckraker
-may have practiced his regenerating art, or perhaps some little rivulet
-of the reform wave just then inundating the larger world outside
-may have trickled down into Loami. What privilege in the town was
-menaced I do not know; what portion of eminent respectability felt
-its perquisites in danger I cannot say; but Privilege seems to have
-done what it always does when pursued--namely, it began to cry for the
-reformation of persons instead of conditions. The new reform mayor,
-like many another mayor, was influenced; and, looking about for someone
-to reform, his eye wandered out of the window of the town hall one May
-morning and lighted on the grizzled marble-players, and he ordered the
-constable into action.
-
-Upon what legal grounds he based his edict I cannot say. It is not
-vital for, as there were about sixteen thousand laws then running in
-his jurisdiction, it would not have been difficult to justify his
-action on legal grounds. It will be remembered that the old men were
-playing in the public square; perhaps they played “for keeps,” and
-it may have been that there were certain little understandings of a
-speculative nature on the side. Above all, the old men were enjoying
-themselves, and if this were not a sufficient offense what could be?
-And if a constable’s highest duty were not to interfere with the
-enjoyment of other folks what would become of the constitution and the
-law?
-
-At any rate the old men were forbidden to play, their game was rudely
-interrupted, their ring obliterated, their marbles confiscated. There
-was, of course, resistance; some skirmishing and scrimmaging; a heated,
-acrimonious proceeding in the mayor’s court, and afterward hatred and
-strife and bad feeling, the formation of factions, and other conditions
-catalogued under law and order. But at length the space worn so smooth
-under the trees near the bandstand was sodded, and the old fellows
-might gather in silent contemplation of a new sign, “Keep off the
-Grass,” and reflect upon this supreme vindication of authority.
-
-But Loami is a democracy, or as much of a democracy as the state will
-permit it to be, and when the next election rolled around the old men
-were alert, and after an exciting contest they elected a mayor of their
-own, a liberal. The reform mayor was relegated to the political limbo
-of one-termers, the privileged few preserved their privileges, and
-the old men, skinning the sod off that portion of the public square,
-drew anew their huge bull-ring, resumed their game, and everybody was
-happy and unreformed except, of course, the reformers; though perhaps
-they were happy, too, in their restored misery of having something to
-complain about and to wag their heads over.
-
-In relating this veracious little tale of the lid of Loami, perhaps
-I have not sufficiently revealed that attitude of moral sympathy
-toward the good characters in the story which Tolstoy insists a writer
-should always assume and maintain. But this has not been due to any
-want of that sympathy. In the shadows of the scene the figure of the
-mayor, for instance, has ever been present--the keenest sufferer, the
-most unhappy man of them all. He was the one of all of them who was
-burdened with official responsibility; the marble-playing faction was
-happy in that it had no responsibility save of that light, artificial
-sort imposed by the rules of its game; its conscience, indeed, was
-untroubled. The other faction--the goo-goos, or whatever they were
-called in Loami--felt responsible primarily for the short-comings of
-others; their consciences were troubled only by the sins of other
-people, the easiest and most comfortable, because it is the most
-normal, position that the human conscience can assume. But the mayor
-was held responsible for everything and everybody, and in seeking to
-do his duty he found that difficulty which must everywhere increase
-in a society and a civilization which, in casting off some of its old
-moorings, recognizes less the responsibility of parent and teacher, not
-to mention personal responsibility, and is more and more disposed to
-look to the law and its administrators as the regulators and mentors of
-conduct.
-
-
-
-
-XLIV
-
-
-It is an axiom of municipal politics that a reform administration,
-or an administration elected as a protest against the evils of
-machine government, boss rule, and the domination of public service
-corporations, is immediately confronted by the demand of those who call
-themselves the good people to enforce all the sumptuary laws and to
-exterminate vice. That is, the privileged interests and their allies
-and representatives seek to divert the attention of the administration
-from themselves and their larger and more complex immoralities to the
-small and uninfluential offenders, an old device, always, in the hope
-of escape, inspired by privilege when pursued, just as friends of the
-fox might turn aside the hounds by drawing the aniseed bag across the
-trail. Many a progressive administration in this land has been led
-into that _cul de sac_, and as Mr. Carl Hovey observed recently of the
-neat saying to the effect that the way to get rid of a bad law is to
-enforce it, the process usually proves to be merely the way to get rid
-of a good administration. The effort had been made by the opponents
-of Golden Rule Jones and it had failed. It had been attempted in the
-case of Tom Johnson and it had failed, though curiously enough the
-effort was never made in Toledo or in Cleveland or in Cincinnati,
-or elsewhere for that matter, in the days of machine domination. The
-Puritan never lets his religion interfere with business.
-
-I used often to recall, in those days, a witty saying of Mr. William
-Travers Jerome, when he was District Attorney in New York. He said he
-often wished that there were two volumes of the Revised Statutes, one
-to contain the laws enacted for human beings, and the other to embalm
-the moral yearnings of rural communities.
-
-It was disturbing and discouraging, of course, to feel that out there
-in the community there was this shadowy mass of well intentioned
-people, the most of whom no doubt, in common with all the rest of
-us, did wish to see moral improvement, and yet so misconstrued and
-misinterpreted our efforts. It was saddening, too, because in the
-work we were trying to do we should have liked their sympathy, their
-interest and their support. Because of their wider opportunity of
-enlightenment much better and nobler things might have been demanded
-of them, but as Johnson Thurston one night pointed out, they did not
-show as much civic spirit, as much concern for the common weal as
-those of smaller opportunities, those bad people as they called them
-of whom much less would naturally have been expected. I made a rule,
-as I have already said somewhere in these pages, not to talk back,
-or to argue with them. They viewed life from the Puritan standpoint,
-and I suppose that I viewed it from the pagan standpoint. The sins of
-others and their mistakes and failures never did excite in me that
-moral indignation which exists in the breasts of some; perhaps the old
-distinction between bad people and good people had been blurred in my
-consciousness. I could see that the bad people did many good things
-in their lives, and that the good people thought many dark and evil
-thoughts. I had seen indeed so much more kindness and consideration,
-so much more pity and mercy shown by the bad that I felt strengthened
-in my philosophy and in my belief that if their environment could be
-improved, if they could have a better chance in life, they would be as
-good as anybody. It seemed to me that most of the crime in the world
-was the result of involuntary poverty, and the tremendous, perhaps
-insuperable task, was to make involuntary poverty impossible. But in
-the meantime there was other work to be done. Aside from the problem of
-transportation which was but one phase of the great struggle between
-privilege and the people, of plutocracy with democracy, there were
-civic centers, city halls, markets, swimming pools, bridges to be
-built, parks to be improved, boulevards and parkways to be laid out,
-a filtration plant to be installed, improvements in all of the other
-departments, a great mass of wonderful work for the promotion of the
-public amenities, the public health, and the adornment of the city,
-in a word, there was a city to be built, and strangely enough this
-group of objectors of whom I have been speaking, were so intensely
-preoccupied with moral considerations that they never had even the
-slightest interest in these improvements. I think it is this spirit of
-Puritanism that has made the cities of America so ugly, or permitted
-them to be ugly; such conceptions as beauty and ugliness are perhaps
-impossible to minds that know no distinction but good and bad, and for
-this reason it has been difficult to make an æsthetic appeal with any
-effectiveness.
-
-During three of my four terms in that office the nasty quarrel about
-morals raged. As I look back and think now with what virulence it did
-rage, it appeals to me as a remarkable psychological phenomenon. Of
-course it was bad for those who engaged in it, and bad for the town
-as well, for such an exaggerated idea of conditions was given that
-the police in neighboring cities, clever rogues that they were, could
-always excuse and exculpate themselves for any of their delinquencies
-by saying that the thieves that had come to town hailed from Toledo, or
-that those they could not catch had gone and taken refuge there. But I
-did not engage in the discussion nor permit the police officials to do
-so. There was no time, since there was so much other work to do, and
-we went on as well as we could with what Tom Johnson used to call the
-policy of administrative repression, improving moral conditions with
-such means as we had. We did succeed in eliminating the wine rooms,
-in closing the saloons at midnight, and finally, after a tremendous
-effort, in extirpating professional gambling. It was of no consequence
-that it did not have any effect upon criticism, for we did not do it
-to stop criticism, and the discussion went on until I had been elected
-for the third time, and immediately after that election when a large
-majority of the people had again spoken their minds on the subject, it
-was considered the proper time to reopen the discussion and to hold a
-so-called civic revival. The young, uncultured man they brought to town
-to conduct that revival, could have known nothing whatever of life, and
-was wholly unconscious of the great economic forces which, with so much
-complexity and friction, were building the modern city. He came to call
-on me before he opened his revival that he might have, as he said, a
-personal, private and confidential talk. When I asked him how the city
-could be regenerated, he said he did not know, but this fact did not
-prevent him from telling the audiences he addressed that week just what
-should be done, and that he, for instance, could nobly do it, and in
-the end they sent a committee to me to tell me what to do, if not how
-to do it. I asked the committee to reduce their complaints to writing,
-to point out those evils which they considered most objectionable,
-and to propose means of combating them. The committee went away and
-I confess I did not expect to see them again because I had no notion
-that they could ever agree as to the particular evils, but after some
-weeks they had come to terms on a few heads, and filed their complaint
-pointing out several specific vices in town, and as a remedy proposed
-that they be “prevented.” I replied to them in a letter in which I
-said all I could think of at that time or all I could think of now on
-this whole vexed problem. It was printed in pamphlet form and rather
-widely circulated, and finally published as a little book.[B] I do not
-know that it convinced anybody who was not convinced already. I think
-we got along a little better afterward than we had before, and by the
-time my fourth term was done the phenomenon of the discussion, if not
-the vice, had disappeared. After my letter was sent to the committee,
-it was said that they would reply to it, but they never did, and
-instead invited the Reverend William A. Sunday to come to the city to
-conduct a revival. It was announced by some that he came to assault our
-position, but when he arrived Captain Anson, the old Chicago baseball
-player, under whom Mr. Sunday had played baseball in his younger days,
-happened to be giving his monologue at a variety theater that week,
-and he and Mr. Sunday together called on me. I do not know when I have
-had a pleasanter hour than that we spent talking about the old days in
-Chicago when Anson had been playing first base and I had been reporting
-the baseball games for the old _Herald_. That, to be sure, was after
-the days of Billy Sunday’s services in right field, but it was not too
-late for me to have known and celebrated the prowess of that famous
-infield, Anson, Pfeffer, Williamson and Burns, and we could celebrate
-them again and speculate as to whether there were really giants in
-those days whose like was known on earth no more.
-
-Mr. Sunday conducted his revival with the success that usually attends
-his efforts in that direction, but he did not mention me or the
-administration until the very close of his visit, when he said that
-we were doing as well as anybody could be expected to do under all the
-circumstances.
-
-
-
-
-XLV
-
-
-When I referred to the general rule that policemen are disliked and
-condemned I should have noticed certain exceptions. The traffic squad
-for instance is generally held in a respect and affection that is part
-of the civic pride of the community. Those fine big fellows on the
-corner, waving this way or that with a gesture the flowing traffic
-of the street, are greeted with smiles, and, as they assist in the
-perilous passage of the thoroughfares, sometimes with thanks and
-benedictions. The reason, of course, is simple; they are not engaged
-in hurting people, but in helping people, and so by the operation of
-the immutable law, they attract to themselves the best feelings of the
-people.
-
-And this is what we tried from the first to have all our policemen
-do, to help people and not to hurt them. It was what Jones had tried
-to do, and he had begun with one of the most interesting experiments
-in policing a city that has been made in our country. He took away
-the clubs from the policemen. He could have made at first no greater
-sensation if he had taken away the police altogether, the protest was
-so loud, so indignant, above all so righteous. What sense of security
-could a community feel if the policemen were to have no clubs, how
-would the unruly and the lawless be kept in check when they no longer
-beheld this insignia of authority in the hands of the guardians of the
-peace? And perhaps to reassure the righteous and truly good Jones gave
-the policemen canes and ran the great risk of making them ridiculous.
-
-I am not sure that he would have cared much if he had, since he had
-so little respect for the police idea, and of course he had as little
-regard for organization. I remember once that at a session of the
-old police board he opposed the creation of new sergeants; he said a
-sergeant always seemed as superfluous to him as a presiding elder in
-the Methodist Church. With an elected board of police commissioners
-over it the police force was pretty certain to be demoralized, of
-course, as is any executive department of government which is directed
-by a board, for with a board, unless all the members save one are
-either dead or incapacitated, discipline and efficiency are impossible.
-We got rid of the board system in Ohio after two or three sessions of
-the legislature had been wrestled with, and though the “mayor’s code”
-was never enacted, many of its ideas were adopted in amendments to the
-municipal code, so that we approached the most efficient form of city
-government yet devised in our rather close resemblance to the federal
-plan.
-
-The time came, however, when the old elected board of public service
-was succeeded by a director of public service appointed by the mayor,
-and the old board of public safety by a director of public safety
-appointed by the same authority, though that was not until I had
-entered on my third term in the mayor’s office. When that time came
-I appointed as Director of Public Service Mr. John Robert Cowell, a
-Manxman who managed the department of public works admirably, and to
-the post of Director of Public Safety Mr. John Joseph Mooney, whose
-services and assistance I had already had on the board of public safety
-when that was appointed by the mayor. And Mr. Mooney was able to work
-out many of the improvements we hoped to make in the police department.
-
-And as Jones had taken the clubs away from the policemen and given
-them canes, we took away the canes and sent them forth with empty
-hands. Jones had the idea of doing away with clubs from London where
-he observed the bobbies who control the mighty traffic in the streets
-of London. We were therefore able to realize the whole of his ideal in
-that respect, and our city, I think alone of all American cities, could
-not merit the reproach that a Liverpool man once made to me when we
-were discussing superficial appearances in the two nations. “The most
-offensive thing in America to me,” he said, “is the way in which the
-policemen parade their truncheons.” The public made no complaint at
-the disappearance of the canes, but the policemen did; they felt lost,
-they reported, without something to twirl in their hands. We thought of
-letting them have swagger sticks, but finally decided that they should
-be induced to bear themselves gracefully with their white gloved hands
-unoccupied. The white gloves were the subject of amusement to the boors
-in town, who could always be amused at any effort at improvement, but
-with them on, and the new uniforms we had patterned after the uniform
-worn by the New York policemen, the members of the department soon
-began to have a pride in themselves.
-
-And that was exactly what we were trying to inculcate, though it was
-difficult to do, and almost impossible, one might think, since for
-generations policemen have been the target for the sarcasms and abuse
-of every voice of the community. The wonder is, with such an universal
-conspiracy as exists in America to give policemen a bad name, that they
-have any character left at all. Surely each community in various ways
-has done everything it could to strip its policemen of every shred of
-reputation and self respect and with these gone, character might be
-expected shortly to follow. Of course the new uniforms were ridiculed
-too, but we did not let that discourage us.
-
-There was the civil-service law to help, and we were of old devoted
-to the spirit and even to the letter of that, though once the letter
-of that law compelled us to an injustice, as the letter of any law
-must do now and then. We had reorganized the police department on a
-metropolitan basis, and had done the same with the fire department, and
-in this department there were accordingly created three new positions
-of battalion chiefs, for which captains were eligible. The oldest
-ranking captain in the department was Dick Lawler, by everyone in the
-department from the chief down conceded to be the best fireman in the
-department, with a long and untarnished record of devoted duty and
-quiet, unassuming bravery. And it was his natural ambition to round out
-that career as one of the chiefs. The examining board held a written
-test, and as Lawler was more accomplished in extinguishing, or, as his
-comrades expressed it, in fighting fire, and much more comfortable and
-at home on the roof of a burning building than he was at a desk with a
-pen in his hand, he did not do very well. When, for instance, he read a
-long hypothetical question, setting forth certain conditions at a fire
-and asking the applicant where, under such circumstances, he would lay
-the hose, Lawler wrote down as his answer, “Where it would do the most
-good,” and on that answer the board marked him zero. The board marked
-him zero on so many answers indeed that the net result was almost zero,
-and he failed.
-
-It was a kind of tragedy, in its little way, as he stood in my office
-that morning on which he came to appeal from the board, with tears in
-his eyes. But the law was obdurate and I was helpless. But I did point
-out to the examining board the absurdity of such methods of testing a
-man’s ability, and after that they allowed a man’s record to count for
-fifty per cent. And it was not long until a vacancy occurred among the
-chiefs--and Lawler was appointed.
-
-
-
-
-XLVI
-
-
-The questions put to Lawler were perhaps no more absurd than many
-a one framed by civil-service examiners. In any event the written
-examination is apt to do as much harm as good, and for policemen and
-firemen we came to the conclusion that it was almost wholly worthless,
-once it had been determined that an applicant could write well enough
-to turn in an intelligible report. The initial qualification on which
-we came to rely and to regard as most important was the physical
-qualification. There is no way to tell by asking a man questions
-whether he will be a good policeman or not; the only way to find
-that out is to try him for a year. But his physical condition can be
-determined, and on this basis we began to build the police force, under
-the direction of Dr. Peter Donnelly, one of the ablest surgeons in the
-country, whose tragic early death was seemingly but a part of that
-fate which took from us in a few short years so many of the best and
-brightest of the young men in our movement. The death of Peter Donnelly
-left us desolate because he had a genius for friendship equal to that
-genius as a surgeon which enabled him to render a great social service.
-
-He was perfectly rigid in the examinations to which he subjected
-applicants for positions in the department, and wholly inaccessible to
-any sort of influence in favor of the unfit. In the old days, which
-by many were regretted as the good old days, the only qualification
-an applicant needed was a friend on the police board, and as a result
-the force was encumbered with the lame, the halt, and the blind; there
-were drinkers if not drunkards among them, and the paunches which some
-bore before them were so great that when they took their belts off
-and hung them up in those resorts where they accepted the hospitality
-of a midnight meal, the belts seemed to be as large as the hoops of
-the Heidelberg tun. We rid the force of these as quickly as it could
-be done, and the recruits who replaced them were, because of Dr.
-Donnelly’s care and service, superb young fellows, lithe and clean, who
-bore themselves with self respect and an ardent pride in that _esprit
-de corps_ we were enabled to develop.
-
-But before that spirit could exist there were defects other than
-physical that must be removed; there were old jealousies and
-animosities, some of a religious, or rather a theological nature--relic
-of an old warfare between the sects that once devastated the town with
-its unreasoning and remorseless and ignorant hatred; a St. Patrick’s
-day had once been celebrated by dismissing a score or more of Irishmen
-from the police department. There were other differences of race
-origin, and in doing away with all these, so far as it could be done,
-Mr. Mooney, the Director of Public Safety, had to his assistance the
-ability and the tact of two crusted old characters on the force, one
-of them the Chief of Police, Perry D. Knapp, and the other Inspector
-John Carew, whose hair had so whitened in the days he served the city
-as a detective that he was called Silver Jack. He was one of the ablest
-detectives anywhere, though prejudice and jealousy had kept him down
-for a long time. I had known him in my youth, and later in the courts,
-and now that I had the chance I put him at the head of the detective
-department, and when I was tired of the troubles which harassed him
-and me during the day, I tried sometimes to forget them at night by
-writing stories in which he figured as the clever detective he was.
-
-And as for Perry Knapp, I suppose there was not another chief of
-police like him anywhere. Over his desk was a picture of Walt Whitman,
-and in his heart was the love for humanity that Whitman had, and in
-his library were well read copies of Emerson and a collection of
-Lincolniana I have often envied him. He had served in close association
-with Jones, who had made his position difficult by promoting him over
-the heads of others in the department who ranked him, and he was
-the heir of all the old distrust of Jones’s attitude toward life.
-Nevertheless, he found a way to apply Jones’s theories to the policing
-of a city without any of that ostentation which in some cases has
-brought such methods into disfavor. I cannot, of course, describe his
-whole method, but he was always trying to help people and not to hurt
-them. He established a system by which drunken men were no longer
-arrested, but, when they could not be taken home as were those club
-members with whom he tried in that respect at least to put them on a
-parity, they were cared for at police headquarters until morning, and
-then with a bath and a breakfast, allowed to go without leaving behind
-to dog their footsteps that most dreadful of all fates, a “police
-record.” No one will ever know how many poor girls picked up in police
-raids he saved from the life to which they had been tempted or driven,
-by sending them back to their homes when they had homes, or in some
-manner finding for them a way out of their troubles. And I shall always
-remember with a pleasure that there is such good in humanity after all,
-when I recall that boy in the workhouse whom a father in a far-off
-city was seeking. The boy was working with other prisoners on a bit
-of public work in one of the parks that winter morning, and after he
-had secured a parole, the Chief drove out to the park, and got the
-boy, clothed him with garments he had bought himself, bought a railway
-ticket and sent the boy away to Chicago and his home. If he had waited
-until the lad was brought in at night, he explained, the old man would
-have lost a whole day of his son’s companionship!
-
-That is what I mean when I say that a government should be made human,
-or part of what I mean; such incidents are specifically noticeable
-because they stand out in such contrast against the hard surface of
-that inhuman institutionalism the reformers with their everlasting
-repressions and denials and negatives are trying to make so much
-harder. Charley Stevens, the old circus man whom I appointed as
-Superintendent of the Workhouse, very successfully applied the some
-principle to the management of that institution, which he conducted
-with his humor and quaint philosophy more than by any code of rules.
-He usually referred to his prison as the Temple of Thought, and he
-abolished from it all the marks of a prison, such as stripes and
-close cropped polls, and all that sort of thing. He was criticized,
-of course, since the conventional notion is that prisoners should be
-made to appear as hideous as possible; I am pretty sure that reformer
-disapproved who one Sunday afternoon went down there and asked the
-superintendent if he would permit him to preach to the inmates and was
-told by Stevens that he would like to accommodate him, but that he
-could not just then break up the pedro game. There were those who said
-that he was making it too easy for the prisoners, and yet every now
-and then some of them would escape, and when they were brought back,
-as they usually were, they were met only with reproaches and asked why
-they could not leave their addresses when they went away so that their
-mail could be forwarded. There were, however, two escaping prisoners
-who never were returned. They got away just in time to make a sensation
-for the noon editions of the newspapers, and as I was on my way to
-luncheon I met Stevens, standing on the street corner, very calmly,
-while the newsboys were crying in our ears the awful calamity that had
-befallen society. When I asked what he was doing, he said that he was
-hunting the escaped prisoners. “I’ve been to the Secor and the Boody
-House,” he said, naming two leading hotels, “and they’re not there. I’m
-going over to the Toledo Club now, and if they’re not there, I don’t
-know where to look for them.”
-
-It may be that in these little incidents I give the impression that he
-was a trifler, but that is not the case. He knew, of course, that so
-far as doing any good whatever in the world is concerned, our whole
-penal system is a farce at which one might laugh if it did not cause
-so many tears to be shed in the world. But he did try to be kind to
-the inmates, and by the operation of the parole system succeeded to
-an extent commensurate with that attained by Dr. Cooley of Cleveland.
-Of course it was all done under the supervision of Mr. Mooney, the
-Director of Public Safety, who rightly characterized our whole penal
-system when he said:
-
-“Whenever you send one to prison you send four or five; you send a
-man’s wife and his mother, and his sister and his children, who are all
-innocent, and you never do him any good.”
-
-But the workhouse, though under Mr. Mooney’s direction, was not
-connected with the police department, except in the archaic minds of
-those who thought if we were only harsh and hard enough in our use of
-both, we could drive evil, or at least the appearance of evil, out
-of the city, and leave it, standing like a rock of morality, in the
-weltering waste of immorality all about us.
-
-
-
-
-XLVII
-
-
-In no respect has the utter impotence of medieval machinery in
-suppressing vice been more definitely proved than in the great failure
-of society in dealing with what is called the social evil. Whenever
-my mind runs on this subject, as anyone’s mind must in the present
-recrudescence of that Puritanism which never had its mind on anything
-else, I invariably think of Golden Rule Jones and the incidents in
-that impossible warfare which worried him into a premature grave. He
-was an odd man, born so far out of his time that the sins of others
-never troubled his conscience. He was so great, and knew so much of
-life, more perhaps than he did of history, on every page of which he
-would have found the confirmations of the opinions life had taught him,
-that he divined all lewdness, all obscenity to be subjective and not
-objective, so that he found less to abhor in the sins of the vicious
-than in the state of mind of their indefatigable accusers and pursuers.
-And he had his own way of meeting their complaints. Once a committee of
-ladies and gentlemen called upon him with the demand that he obliterate
-the social evil, off-hand and instantly. They were simple, brief and to
-the point. They informed him that the laws providing for chastity were
-being broken, that there were prostitutes in the city, and in short,
-urged him to put a stop to it.
-
-“But what am I to do?” he inquired. “These women are here.”
-
-“Have the police,” they said, a new, simple and happy device suddenly
-occurring to them, “drive them out of town and close up their houses!”
-They sat and looked at him, triumphantly.
-
-“But where shall I have the police drive them? Over to Detroit or to
-Cleveland, or merely out into the country? They have to go somewhere,
-you know.”
-
-It was a detail that had escaped them, and presently, with his great
-patience, and his great sincerity, he said to them:
-
-“I’ll make you a proposition. You go and select two of the worst of
-these women you can find, and I’ll agree to take them into my home and
-provide for them until they can find some other home and some other way
-of making a living. And then you, each one of you, take one girl into
-your home, under the same conditions, and together we’ll try to find
-homes for the rest.”
-
-They looked at him, then looked at each other, and seeing how utterly
-hopeless this strange man was, they went away.
-
-
-
-
-XLVIII
-
-
-To be sure, that was in another day. Prostitution had not become a
-subject for polite conversation at the dinner table; pornographic vice
-commissions had not been organized and provided with appropriations so
-that their hearings might be stenographically reported and published
-along with the filthy details gathered in the stews and slums of
-cities by trained smut hunters; it had not yet been discovered that
-the marriage ceremony required a new introduction, based upon the
-scientific investigations of the clinical laboratory, and on the same
-brilliant thought that centuries ago struck the wise men of Bohemia,
-who, when the population increased too rapidly, prohibited marriages
-for a number of years that proved, of course, to be the most prolific
-the land had ever known.
-
-The new conception was created in a moment, in the twinkling of an
-eye, by the necromancy of a striking phrase. I do not know who it is
-that had the felicity to employ it first in its present relation. I
-remember that long years ago, when as a boy I used to frequent the
-gallery of the theater, I sat rapt afar in the mystery and romance
-of life on the Mississippi while gazing on the scenes of Bartley
-Campbell’s melodrama “The White Slave.” I can call back now, with
-only a little effort of the imagination and the will, that wonderful
-pageant--the _Natchez_, the _Robert E. Lee_, the great steamboats I
-knew so well from Mark Twain’s book, the plantation hands, the darkies
-singing on the levee, the moonlight and the jasmine flower--and there
-was no David Belasco in those days to set the scene either, nor, for
-the imagination of youth, any need of one! And then the beautiful
-octoroon, so lily white and fragile that it should have been patent to
-all, save perhaps an immoral slave-holder, from the very first scene,
-that she had no drop of negro blood! And the handsome and cruel owner
-and master, with his slouch hat and top boots, and fierce mustache and
-imperial, taking her to her awful fate down the river! It was an old
-story Bartley Campbell used for his plot, a story which had for me an
-added interest, because my grandfather had told it to me out of his
-own southern experiences, in those far-off days when he had business
-that took him down the river to New Orleans. And it was a story which,
-for a while, in many variants of its original form, was told all over
-the land to illustrate the immorality of slavery. I suspect that it
-was not altogether true in its dramatic details; surely no such number
-of lovely and innocent creatures were permitted to fling themselves
-into the Mississippi from the hurricane decks of steamboats as the
-repetitions and variations of that tale would indicate; it would have
-been altogether too harrowing to the voyagers, some few of whom at
-least must have been virtuous, and journeyed up and down on peaceful
-moral missions of one sort and another. No doubt it was symbolic of
-a very wrong condition, and I suppose that is what justified it in
-the minds of those who told it over and over without the trouble of
-verifying its essential details. It was a good story, and in the
-hands of Mr. Howells it made a good poem, and it made surely a pretty
-good play, which, could it enthrall me now as once it did by its
-enchantments, I should like to see again to-night!
-
-But I doubt if I could sit through any one of the plays that have
-been written or assuredly are to be written about the white slaves of
-to-day. The plot has been right at hand in the tale that has gone the
-rounds of two continents, and resembles that elder story so closely in
-its incidents of abduction that I presume the adapter of its striking
-title to the exigencies of current reform must have been old enough to
-recognize its essential similarity to the parent tradition. It was told
-in books, it served to ornament sermons and addresses on sociological
-subjects, and it has, I believe, already been done in novels that are
-among the best sellers. The newspapers printed it with all its horrific
-details; it was so precisely the sort of pornography to satisfy the
-American sense of news--a tale of salacity for the prurient, palliated
-and rendered aseptic by efforts of officials, heated to the due
-degree of moral indignation, to bring the concupiscent to justice.
-I had been in England, too, when the subject was under discussion
-there, and this same story was told to such effect that Parliament,
-as hysterical as one of our own state legislatures, had been led to
-restore the brutality of flogging. It was always the same: some poor
-girl had been abducted, borne off to a brothel, ruined by men employed
-for that purpose, turned over to aged satyrs, and never heard of more.
-Of course there were variations; sometimes the girl was lured away
-in a motor car, sometimes by a request for assistance to some lady
-who had fainted, sometimes by other ruses. The story was always told
-vehemently, but on the authority of some inaccessible third person,
-to doubt or question whom was to be suspected of sympathy with the
-outrage. But however high the station, or unimpeachable the character
-of the informants, anyone who had the slightest knowledge of the rules
-of evidence, unless he were especially credulous, would have reason
-to doubt the tales. In Toledo it had its vogue. It went the rounds of
-gentlemen’s clubs and the tea tables of the town, and in the curious
-way stories have, it went on and on with new embellishments at each
-repetition. I had a curiosity about it, not because I cared for the
-realistic details that might as Pooh Bah used to say, “lend an air
-of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing
-narrative,” but because here was a chance to test it at first hand,
-and so I asked the person most heroically concerned to come and tell
-me of an experience that had earned for him the plaudits of many of
-his fellow citizens and citizenesses. And so he came. He was a social
-worker, as they are called, and had had the training in settlement work
-which is said to qualify young persons to deal professionally with the
-poor and wicked. He was a rather good looking young chap, with a smile
-about his full red lips, who lifted his mild eyes to yours with perhaps
-an effort at frankness too pronounced. He spoke well and fluently.
-
-One night (he said) at the close of a hard day’s work in his mission,
-a man came to him in evident distress. The man was a business man, in
-comfortable though modest circumstances, with a family of which perhaps
-the most interesting member was a beautiful girl of seventeen. The
-girl was attending a high school, where she was in one of the advanced
-classes, and the evening before had gone from school to spend the night
-at the home of a friend, a girl of her own age. The next evening, on
-her failure to return home, the parents became alarmed, and after
-unavailing inquiry at her schoolmate’s house, and in other quarters,
-the distraught father had appealed to the social worker. The social
-worker at once caused an investigation to be made, and by a process
-of elimination (as he said, though unlike Sherlock Holmes, he did not
-detail the successive steps of his logic), he concluded that the girl
-was in a certain quarter of the city, in fact in a certain street. He
-then sent for the father, told him to supply himself with sufficient
-money, instructed him in the part he was to play, and was careful to
-stipulate that if he, the social worker, were to feign drunkenness or
-to indulge in conduct out of keeping with his character, the father was
-patiently and trustingly to await results. Thereupon they set forth,
-and before midnight visited some thirty houses of ill fame. In the
-thirty-first house the suspicions of the social worker were confirmed,
-and, pretending to be intoxicated, he invited an inmate to accompany
-him, and ascended to the upper floor. He tried the doors along the
-hall, and finding them all open but one, and that locked, he lurched
-against it, broke it open, and on entering the room surprised a young
-woman, entirely nude, who screamed--until he muttered some word of
-understanding and encouragement. Meanwhile the inmate had summoned
-madame the proprietress, who flew up the stairs, burst into the room
-and emptied her revolver at the social worker.
-
-The social worker, at this supreme moment in his recital, paused, and
-with a weary but reassuring smile, as who should say such adventures
-were diurnal monotonies in his life, remarked: “with no damage,
-however, to anything but the furniture and the woodwork.”
-
-But he had the girl in his arms, and, thrusting aside foiled madame
-and the inmate, bore his charge downstairs, snatched a raincoat from
-the hall rack, wrapped it about her, called to the father to come, and
-escaped into the street.
-
-After the rescued girl had been restored to her home, and sufficiently
-recovered from her terrible experience to give a connected account
-of herself, she related the following incidents: Leaving school on
-that night she had started for the home of the girl whom she was to
-visit--the girl not having attended school that day--and while passing
-a house in a respectable residential district, about five o’clock of
-the winter evening, darkness already having fallen, a woman came to the
-door and in great distress told the girl that a baby was sick, that she
-was alone, and implored the girl to come in and care for the baby while
-she ran for a doctor. The girl complied, and on reaching the door, was
-immediately seized, drawn into the hallway, her cries smothered by a
-hand in which there was a handkerchief saturated with chloroform, and
-she knew no more until she regained consciousness in the place where
-the social worker had rescued her.
-
-Here his direct recital ended. I put to him two or three questions:
-Who is the girl? Where is she now? Where is the house into which she
-was beguiled? Where is the brothel in which she was imprisoned? He had
-answers for all these. The girl’s name could not be divulged, even in
-official confidence, for the family could not risk publicity; the house
-where she had been summoned to care for the ailing baby was the home of
-wealthy and respectable people, who had been out of town at the time,
-and their residence had been broken into and used temporarily by the
-white slavers. As for the brothel, the social worker, by methods he did
-not disclose, had compelled the proprietress to leave the city, and the
-place was closed.
-
-Such was the amazing adventure of the social worker. It was easy to
-imagine the effect of it when related to neurotic women, to prurient
-and sentimental men, and in country churches to gaping yokels curious
-about “life” in the city. It was easy to understand the effect it
-would have on minds starved and warped by Puritanism, ready for any
-sensation, especially one that might stimulate their moral emotions,
-and give them one more excuse for condemning the police. No wonder
-certain of the elect brethren in gratitude for having been told just
-what they wished to hear had contributed hundreds of dollars, that the
-“work” might go on!
-
-I determined, therefore, that in one instance, at least, the truth as
-to this stock story should be discovered, and I requested Mr. Mooney,
-the Director of Public Safety, to make a complete investigation. He
-detailed to the task the best of his detectives; the inspectors of the
-federal government under the white slave laws were called in, and I
-asked two clergymen of my acquaintance who knew the social worker and
-said they believed him, to give what aid they could. Together they
-worked for weeks. They made an exhaustive investigation, and their
-conclusion, in which the clergymen joined, was that there was not the
-slightest ground for the silly tale.
-
-It was, of course, simply another variant of the story that had gone
-the rounds of the two continents, a story which had been somehow
-psychologically timed to meet the hysteria which the pulpit, the press,
-and the legislatures had displayed, as had the people, in one of those
-strange moral movements which now and then seize upon the public mind,
-and, in effect, make the whole population into a mob, which is, of
-coarse, the most moral thing in the world. The subject was investigated
-in England and it was shown that not one of the stories told in this
-cause there had any foundation in fact.[C] So far as I know, no
-authentic verification of the story in any of its forms has ever been
-made. And yet it was the stock in trade of the professional moralists
-and was employed by them in two continents to generate that hysteria
-without which they cannot carry on their reforms. It was repeated and
-accepted--that is all, and to doubt it was to make oneself _particeps
-criminis_, a sort of accessory after the fact.
-
-
-
-
-XLIX
-
-
-It is a subject which only the student of morbid psychology, I
-suppose, can illuminate properly, but I fancy he would find somewhere
-a significance in the phrase “white slave,” when acted upon by minds
-that had never been refined enough to imagine any but the grossest of
-objective crimes, and out of all this there arose a new conception of
-the prostitute quite as grotesque as that which it replaced. She was no
-longer the ruined and abandoned thing she once was, too vile for any
-contact with the virtuous and respectable; she no longer occupied even
-the sacrificial pose in which Cato centuries ago and Lecky in our own
-time figured her; she was not even that daughter of joy whose dalliance
-is the secret despair of moralists too prudent to imitate her abandon;
-she became the white slave, a shanghaied innocent kept under lock
-and key. And thousands and thousands of her sisters were said to be
-trapped every year in precisely the same way by the minions of a huge
-system, organized like any modern combination of rapacity and evil,
-with luxurious headquarters, presumably in some sky-scraper in New
-York, and its own attorneys, agents, kidnappers, crimpers, seducers,
-panderers and procuresses all over the land, a vast and complicated
-organization, with baffling ramifications in all the high and low
-places of the earth. The sensational newspapers referred to it as “the
-white slave syndicate,” as though it were as authentic as the steel
-trust or Standard Oil. It was even said that somewhere in New York
-the trust conducted a daily auction! With such a bizarre notion, the
-victims of their own psychic lasciviousness became obsessed. Raids and
-“revivals” must be inaugurated, a body of new laws enacted, and a horde
-of official inspectors, agents and detectives turned loose on the land,
-empowered to arrest any man and woman traveling together, and hold the
-man guilty of a felony.
-
-To be sure, it was something to have the conception change. It was
-something that the prostitute should at last be regarded with some
-touch of human pity. And it was something, a great deal, indeed,
-that there was, with all the fanatical and zealous law making, some
-quiet study of the problem. The word “economic,” so long scorned
-by the proponents of an absolute morality, somehow penetrated the
-public consciousness, and at last it dawned on the human mind that
-prostitution is related to economic pressure. But, unfortunately, by
-the familiar human process, the mind leaped to extremes; it was assumed
-that all prostitutes were girls who did not receive sufficient wages,
-and the simple and all sufficient cure was to be the minimum wage;
-instead of receiving eight dollars a week and going to the bad, all
-working girls were to be paid nine dollars a week and remain virtuous.
-And of course new work for the constable was cut out; if the employers
-of girls did not pay them that much, they were all to go to jail, and
-if the girls did not remain chaste after they had been assured of that
-splendid income, they must go to the pillory for the godly to spit at.
-This, with the laws against white slavery, was to be the panacea, and
-prostitution, a problem which had perplexed the thoughtful for thirty
-centuries, was to be solved before the autumn primaries, so that those
-who solved it might get their political rewards promptly.
-
-I used to wish, when it was presented to me as mayor, that some of
-these cock-sure persons who would solve the problem off-hand by
-issuing a general order to the police, could get themselves elected
-to the opportunity. Of course I issued no general order on the
-subject; perhaps I was too skeptical, too much lacking in faith in the
-miraculous powers of the constabulary. Our city was like all cities;
-there were prostitutes in brothels, prostitutes in saloons, prostitutes
-in flats, prostitutes on the streets at night. There were, for
-instance, a score or more of disorderly saloons where men and women
-congregated. But we found that merely by posting a policeman in uniform
-before such a place, its patronage was discouraged, and in a few days
-discontinued. Of course it was a dangerous and preposterous power to
-wield; in the hands of unscrupulous police it might have appalling
-possibilities of evil. I had the idea of stationing a policeman before
-a disorderly house from Tom Johnson, who told me he had it from his
-father--who was Chief of Police in Louisville. And so we adopted it,
-and after a while the wine rooms were no more. And that was something.
-But the girls in them, of course, had to go somewhere, just as Jones
-said.
-
-Then we found that the police, if they were brutal enough, could drive
-the girls off the streets. It seemed to me always a despicable sort
-of business--the actions of the police I mean; I didn’t like to hear
-the reports of it; I don’t like to think of it, or write of it even
-now. It is not very creditable to make war on women, whatever the
-Puritans may say. But the streets would show an improvement, even they
-would admit; much as they might linger and loiter and leer, the most
-seductively pure of them could not get himself “accosted” anywhere
-down town at night. Of course, after a while, the poor things would
-come back, or others exactly like them would come. Then the police
-would have to practice their brutalities all over again. Perhaps they
-were not brutal enough; I am not certain. To be sure they were not
-as brutal as Augustus with his sumptuary laws, or as Theodosius, or
-Valentinian, or Justinian, or Karl the Great, or Peter the Great, or
-St. Louis, or Frederick Barbarossa, or the Empress Maria Theresa in
-Vienna, or as John Calvin in Geneva, or Cotton Mather in Massachusetts,
-with all their tortures and floggings and rackings and brandings
-and burnings; or as the English Puritans who used to have bawds
-whipped, pilloried, branded and imprisoned and for a second offense
-put to death. And even they were not brutal enough, it seems, since
-prostitution went right on down the centuries to our times. I suppose
-that we might have learned from their failures that prostitution could
-not be ended by physical force and brutality. However, when the girls
-were driven from the streets, inasmuch as the police did not despatch
-them, they still had to go somewhere, and the brothels remained. They
-had their own quarter and if it was not a segregated quarter it was
-something very like it, since the police bent their efforts to rid
-other portions of the city of such places. It was perhaps a tolerated
-rather than a segregated district, and after a while the Director of
-Public Safety wished to try the experiment of making it a regulated
-district as well. I felt that the world was too old and I found myself
-too much of its mood to hope that any good could come from any of the
-efforts of policemen to dispose of such a problem, but I was glad of
-any experiment conducted in sincerity that might make for the better,
-and accordingly the Director of Safety put his scheme into operation.
-It was not _reglementation_ in the exact European sense, since the
-temper of our American people will not acquiesce in that, and, as
-I discovered by some inquiries of my own in the principal cities of
-Europe, it is not of very valid effect over there. But the Director
-adopted most of the familiar requirements of the Parisian _reglement_,
-except the examinations, and the registration of those not _en maison_;
-he required the proprietresses to report at police headquarters the
-presence of new inmates; he forbade them to have minors or male
-parasites in the houses, and as far as possible he separated the
-business from the saloon business. Any house which ignored his orders
-found a policeman posted before it; then it came to time. The result
-was, as Mr. Mooney could report in the course of a year, that the
-number of brothels had been reduced from over two hundred to thirty and
-the number of prostitutes of whom the police had any knowledge, in an
-equal proportion. He was very proud when General Bingham complimented
-his policemen and their policing, as he was at similar compliments from
-the government’s white slave agents.
-
-Superficially this was a very gratifying report, but only
-superficially. Five-sixths of the brothels had been closed, but their
-inmates had to go somewhere, just as Jones said, and the police found
-that clandestine prostitution had proportionately increased; the women
-had gone into flats, or hotels, or residences which on occasion could
-be made to serve as assignation houses. It may perhaps have improved
-the life of the prostitute, made it freer and more human, or perhaps it
-indicated that prostitution in America is showing a decadent tendency
-toward refinement. But while they had reduced the number of houses
-of prostitution, the police discovered that they had not reduced
-prostitution in the least, and when, after a trial of four years, I
-asked the Director and the Chief of Police what the result of the
-experiment had been, they said that, aside from the fact that it seemed
-to make for order in the city, and simplified the work of policing, it
-had done no good.
-
-The experience was like that of Chicago, where after a police
-order prohibiting the sale of liquor in houses of prostitution, it
-was found--according to the report of the vice commission--to be
-“undoubtedly true that the result of the order has been to scatter
-the prostitutes over a wide territory and to transfer the sale of
-liquor carried on heretofore in houses to the near-by saloon keepers,
-and to flats and residential sections, but it is an open question
-whether it has resulted in the lessening of either of the two evils of
-prostitution and drink.”
-
-The experience, I think, is probably universal. I used to hear the
-systems of regulation used in European cities held up as models by the
-pessimistic as the only practical method of dealing with the problem.
-Paris was commonly considered as the ideal in this respect; latterly
-it is apt to be Berlin. But the fact is that the _reglementation_
-which for years and years has been in force in Paris is a failure; the
-experience there was precisely what it was in our little city. And from
-Berlin, which the well-known German genius for organization has made
-the most efficiently governed city in the world, the same failure has
-been reported.
-
-In England, on the other hand, there is no regulation; any evening
-along Piccadilly, one may see street walkers whom the police never
-dream of molesting. It is in part due to the traditional Puritanic
-attitude of our northern race, and partly to the respect for personal
-liberty that exists in England. There the principle is much more
-scrupulously respected than with us, with whom individual liberty
-indeed, is hardly a principle at all. With us the phrase “personal
-liberty” is regarded merely as a shibboleth of brewers and distillers,
-an evidence on the part of him who employs it that he is a besotted
-slave to drink and an unscrupulous minion of the rum power. The
-interferences practiced daily by our policemen are unknown there,
-and if, for instance, it should even be proposed that an enactment
-like that in Oklahoma limiting the amount of liquor a man may keep in
-his own house, and providing that agents of the state may enter his
-domicile at will and make a search, and especially if in the remotest
-region of the British Isles there should be an instance of what Walt
-Whitman calls “the never ending audacity of elected persons,” such as
-is of daily occurrence in that state where these agents enter railway
-trains and slit open the valises of travelers in their quest of the
-stuff, the whole of the question hour the next afternoon in the House
-of Commons would be occupied with indignant interpellations of the home
-secretary and the _Times_ could not contain all the letters that would
-be written.
-
-Other lands have made other experiments, but everywhere and in all
-times the same failure has been recorded, from the efforts of Greece to
-control the _hetaerae_ and _dicteriades_ and the severe regulations of
-ancient Rome, down to the latest reform administration in an American
-city. Nothing that mankind has ever tried has been of the slightest
-avail. And now come the vice commissions with their pornographic
-reports, and no doubt feeling that they have to propose something
-after all the trouble they have gone to, when they have set forth in
-tabulated statistics what everybody in the world already knows, they
-repeat the old ineptitudes. That is, more law, more hounding by the
-police.
-
-The Chicago product is the classic and the model for all of these, and
-as the latest and loftiest triumph of the Puritan mind in the realm of
-morals and of law, a triumph for which three centuries of innocence
-of nothing save humor alone could have prepared it, its own great
-masterpiece in morals was at once forbidden circulation in the mails
-because of its immorality!
-
-The problem cannot be solved by policemen, even if--as is now
-recommended--they be called “morals” police. The word has a reassuring
-note of course, possibly by some confused with “moral” police, but
-policemen are policemen still. I have seen the _police des moeurs_
-in European cities, and they look quite like other policemen. And
-all cities in America have had morals police; that is exactly what
-our policemen have been, and that is exactly what is the matter with
-them. That is, all cities have had detectives especially detailed to
-supervise the conduct of the vicious, and they always fail. We had such
-a squad in Toledo for years, though it was not called morals police.
-It was composed of men, mere men, because we had nothing else but men
-to detail to the work. They were honest, decent, self-respecting men
-for the most part, who on the whole did very well considering the
-salaries they were paid and the task imposed on them. They regulated
-vice as well as anybody anywhere could regulate it. But of course they
-failed to solve the problem, just as the world for thousands of years
-has failed to solve it, with all the machinery of all the laws of all
-the lawgivers in history. Solon in Athens tried every known device,
-including segregation. He established a state monopoly of houses of
-prostitution, confined the _dicteriades_ to a certain quarter of the
-city, and compelled them to wear a distinctive dress, but all his
-stringent laws had broken down long before Hyperides dramatically
-bared the breast of Phryne to the Areopagus. In Rome there was the
-most severe regulation in the ancient world and yet--it may be read in
-Gibbon--the successive experiments of the law under Augustus, Tiberius,
-Caligula, Valerian, Theodosius and Justinian were all failures, and
-when the laws were most rigorous and the most rigorously enforced,
-immorality was at its height. Charlemagne tried and failed, and though
-the sentiment of the age of chivalry and the rise of Christianity
-for a while softened the law, under the English Puritans, bawds were
-whipped, pilloried, branded and imprisoned, and for a second offense
-put to death. France was not behind; under Louis IX., prostitutes
-were exiled, and in 1635 an edict in Paris condemned men concerned in
-the traffic to the galleys for life, while the women and girls were
-whipped, shaved and banished for life. Charles V. in the monastery
-at Yuste, trying to make two clocks tick in union, found his efforts
-no more vain than his attempts to regulate human conduct, and Philip
-II. tried again to do what his father had been unable to accomplish.
-Peter the Great was a grim enforcer of the laws, and in Vienna Maria
-Theresa was most rigorous with prostitutes, putting them in a certain
-garb, and then in handcuffs; she was almost as remorseless in her
-treatment of them as was John Calvin in Geneva, which came to have more
-prostitutes proportionately than any other city in Europe. Several
-modern attempts at annihilation have been made. Saxony tried to do
-away with prostitutes, but they exist in Dresden and other cities of
-the Kingdom and Hamburg claims to have banished them, but in that Free
-and Hanseatic city I was told by an American who was investigating the
-subject that there were as many there as elsewhere.
-
-
-
-
-L
-
-
-And these laws have not only failed, they have not only stimulated and
-intensified the evil, but they themselves have created a white slavery
-worse than that of the preposterous tales and sentimental twaddle
-that circulate among the neurotic, a white slavery worse than any ever
-imagined by the most romanticistic of the dime novelists or by the most
-superheated of the professional reformers. Every one of these laws has
-been devised, written and enacted in the identical spirit with which
-the Puritans in Massachusetts branded the red letter on the scarlet
-woman. Every one of them is an element of that brutal and amazing
-conspiracy by which society makes of the girl who once “goes wrong,”
-to use the lightest of our animadversions, a pariah more abhorred and
-shunned than if she were a rotting leper on the cliffs of Molokai. She
-may be human, alive, with the same feelings that all the other girls
-in the world have; she may have within her the same possibilities,
-life may mean exactly the same thing to her, she may have youth with
-all its vague and beautiful longings, but society thunders at her
-such final and awful words as “lost,” “abandoned,” thrusts her beyond
-its pale, and causes her to feel that thereafter forever and forever,
-there is literally no chance of redemption for her; home, society,
-companionship, hope itself, all shut their obdurate doors in her face.
-In all the world there are just two places she may go, the brothel, or
-the river, and even if she choose the latter, that choice, too, is a
-sin. She is “lost” and the awful and appalling lie is thundered in her
-astonished ears by the united voices of a prurient and hypocritical
-society with such indomitable force and persistence that she must
-believe it herself, and acquiesce in its dread finality. And there is
-no course open to her but to go on in sin to the end of days whose
-only mercy is that they are apt to be brief. No off-hand moralist,
-even by exercising his imagination to the last degree of cruelty, has
-ever been able to devise such a prison as that. White slave, indeed,
-shackled by the heaviest chains the Puritan conscience has yet been
-able to forge for others!
-
-Strange, too, since the attitude is assumed by a civilization which
-calls itself Christian and preaches that the old law, with its eye for
-an eye and its tooth for a tooth, was done away with and lost in a new
-and beautiful dispensation. “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no
-more.” If the world is ever to solve this problem, it must first of
-all apprehend the spirit of this simple and gracious expression, do
-away with its old laws, its old cruelties, its old brutalities, its
-old stupidities, and approach the problem in that human spirit which I
-suspect is so very near the divine. Once in this attitude, this spirit,
-society will be in position to learn something from history and from
-human experience, something from life itself, and what it will learn
-first is that Puritanical laws, the hounding of the police, and all
-that sort of thing have never lessened prostitution in the world, but
-on the contrary have increased it.
-
-What! Let them go and not do anything to them? Well, yes, if we can’t
-think of anything better to do to them than to hurt them a little
-more, push them a little farther along the road to that abyss toward
-which we have been hustling them. Why is it constantly necessary to do
-something _to_ people? If we can’t do anything for them, when are we
-going to learn to let them alone? Or must this incessant interference,
-this meddling, this mauling and manhandling, go on in the world forever
-and ever?
-
-As to what is to be done about it, since all that ever has been
-attempted has been so much worse in its effect than if we had never
-done anything, I suppose I need not feel so very much ashamed of
-confessing my ignorance and saying that I do not know. If it were left
-to me I think the first thing I should do is to repeal all the criminal
-laws on the subject, beginning with that most savage enactment the
-Puritan conscience ever devised, namely, the law declaring certain
-children “illegitimate,” a piece of stupid brutality and cruelty that
-would make a gorilla blush with shame if it were even suggested in the
-African jungle.
-
-Yes, the first thing to do is to repeal all the criminal laws on the
-subject. They do no good, and even when it is attempted to enforce
-them, the result is worse than futile. I myself, with my own eyes, in
-the old police court where I have witnessed so many squalid tragedies,
-have seen a magistrate fine a street walker and then suspend the fine
-so that, as he explained to her in all judicial seriousness, she
-might go out and “earn” enough money to come back and pay it! And not
-a person in the court room, so habituated and conventionalized are
-we all, ever cracked a smile or apparently saw anything out of the
-way--least of all the street walker!
-
-But it would not be enough simply to repeal these laws from the
-statute books of the state; it will be necessary to accomplish the
-immensely more difficult task of repealing them from the human heart,
-where they were written long ago in anger, and hatred, and jealousy and
-cruelty and fear, that is in the heat of all the baser passions. What I
-am trying to say is that the first step in any reasonable and effective
-reform is an entire change of attitude on the subject, and about the
-only good to be expected from the agitation about white slavery, with
-all its preposterous exaggeration and absurd sensationalism is that
-it is perhaps making for a changed attitude, a new conception; if it
-will accomplish nothing more than to get the public mind--if there is
-a public mind, and not a mere public passion--to view the prostitute
-as a human being, very much like all the other human beings in the
-world, it will have been worth all it has cost in energy and emotion
-and credulity. If this sort of repeal can be made effective, if the
-prostitute can be assured of some chance in life outside the dead line
-which society so long ago drew for her, the first step will have been
-taken.
-
-The next step possibly will be the erection of a single standard of
-morals. And this cannot be done by passing a law, or by turning in an
-alarm for the police. That means thinking, too, and education, and
-evolution, and all the other slow and toilsome processes of which the
-off-hand reformers are so impatient. This single standard will have to
-be raised first in each individual heart; after that it will become the
-attitude of the general mind.
-
-And then the commerce in vice will have to be stopped. I do not mean
-prohibited by penal laws alone. Policemen cannot stop it, and policemen
-should have no more to do with it than firemen. In fact much of the
-commerce has proceeded from the fact that its regulation has been
-entrusted to the police. It should be a subject for the fiscal laws. It
-is, I assume, known by most persons that the owners of the dilapidated
-tenements in which for the most part prostitution is carried on,
-because of the “risk,” extort exorbitant rentals for them, and then
-on the ground that they can rent them to no one of respectability,
-they hold them to be so worthless that they pay little if any taxes on
-them. Our present tax laws of course have the effect of rewarding the
-slothful, the lazy and the idle, and of punishing the energetic and
-the enterprising producer in business, and it would be quite possible
-to revise the tax laws so that tenderloins would be economically
-impossible, because they would cease to be profitable.
-
-In the next place, or some place in the program, there should be some
-sort of competent and judicious sex education. I do not know just who
-would impart it, since no one as yet knows very much about it, but with
-the earnest, sincere and devoted work that is being carried on all over
-the world by the scientific men and women who are studying eugenics and
-social hygiene, there is hope in this direction, even if it is probable
-that the world will not be saved by the new race of athletes that are
-scientifically to be bred, and may still have some use in its affairs
-for the minds of its cripples who in all times have contributed so much
-to its advancement.
-
-The marvelous phenomenon known as the feminist movement which the
-students and historians of the next two hundred years will be busy
-elucidating will play its part, too, for in its vast impulse toward the
-equality of the sexes it must not only bring the single standard of
-morals, but it should somehow be the means of achieving for women their
-economic independence. This perhaps would be the most important of all
-the steps to be taken in the solution of the problem. The economic
-environment of course is in the lives of many girls a determining
-factor and in this connection the minimum wage indeed has its bearing.
-The old Puritan laws were conceived in minds intensely preoccupied
-with the duty of punishing people for their sins. Prostitutes were
-prostitutes because they were “bad,” and when people were bad they must
-be punished. But now we see, or begin to see, if vaguely, that, except
-in metaphysics, there is no such thing in our complex human life as an
-absolute good or an absolute bad; we begin to discern dimly the causes
-of some of the conduct called bad, and to the problem of evil we begin
-to apply the conception of economic influences, social influences,
-pathological influences, and other influences most of us know little or
-nothing about.
-
-Thus we begin to see that a girl’s wages, for instance, may have
-something to do with what we call her morals; not everything, but
-something. The wages of a girl’s father have something to do with
-them, too, and the wages of her great grandfather for the matter of
-that. So the dividends on which live the delicate and charming ladies
-she beholds alighting from their motor cars every morning in the
-shopping district may have something to do with them, though she is as
-unconscious and as innocent of the relation as they, as ignorant as all
-of us are. Rents have something to do with them, and so do taxes.
-
-But after the whole economic system has been re-adjusted and perfected
-and equalized, after we have the minimum wage, and the single tax, and
-industrial democracy, and every man gets what he produces, and economic
-pressure has been as scientifically adjusted as the atmospheres
-in a submarine torpedo boat, there is always the great law of the
-contrariety of things to be reckoned with, according to which the
-more carefully planned the event, the less it resembles the original
-conception. The human vision is so weak, and the great circle of
-life so prodigious! The solution will come, if it ever comes at all,
-by slow, patient, laborious, drudging study, far from the midnight
-session of the legislature, far from the ear and the pencil of the
-eager reporter, far from the platform of the sweating revivalist, far
-from the head office of the police. Our fondly perused pornography
-might expose the whole of the underworld to the light of day, the
-general assembly might enact successive revisions of the revised
-statutes for a hundred years, we might develop the most superb police
-organization in all history, achieving the apotheosis of the Puritan
-ideal with a dictagraph in every bedroom and closet in the town, and
-it all would be of no avail. The study must survey the whole field
-of social and domestic relations, until the vast mystery of life is
-understood, and the relation between its wide antitheses established
-as Tolstoy presents them in his story of the poor mother who took her
-daughter to the public house in the village, and the rich mother who,
-at the same time, took her daughter to the court at St. Petersburg.
-It will be found perhaps in the long run, for which so few are ever
-willing to remain, that the eradicable causes of prostitution are
-due to involuntary poverty, and the awful task is to get involuntary
-poverty out of the world. It is a task which has all the tremendous
-difficulties of constructive social labor and it is as deliberate as
-evolution itself. And even if it is ever accomplished, there will
-remain a residuum in the problem inhering in the mysteries of sex,
-concerning which even the wisest and most devoted of our scientists
-will confess they know very little as yet and have not much to tell us
-that will do us any good.
-
-
-
-
-LI
-
-
-In taking the present occasion to say so much about the work in morals
-which a mayor is expected to perform, I have a disquieting sense that
-I have fallen into a tone too querulous for the subject, and perhaps
-taken a mean advantage of the reader in telling of my troubles. It is
-rather a troubled life that a mayor leads in one of these turbulent
-American cities, since so much of his time is taken up by reformers who
-seem to expect him somehow to do their holy work for them, and yet that
-is doubtless the business of reformers in this world, and since it is
-their mission to trouble someone, perhaps it is the business of a mayor
-to be troubled by them in his vicarious and representative capacity. I
-should not deny reformers their rights in this respect, or their uses
-in this world, and I should be the last to question their virtues.
-John Brown was beyond doubt a strong character and an estimable man,
-who did a great and heroic work in the world, even if he did do it in
-opposition to the law, and by the law was killed at last for doing it,
-but by all accounts he must have been a terrible person to live with,
-and I have often been glad that I was not mayor of Ossawattomie when
-he was living and reforming there. I would as soon have had Peter the
-Hermit for a constituent.
-
-I shall not go quite so far as to admit that our reformers were as
-strong in character as either of these great models I have mentioned,
-but they were as persistent, or in combination they were as persistent;
-when one tired or desisted, another promptly took his place; there
-were so many that they could spell each other, and work in relays, and
-thus keep the torch ever alive and brandishing. It was not only the
-social evil with which they were concerned, but the evil of drink, and
-the evil of gambling, and the evil of theaters, and the evil of moving
-pictures, and post cards, and of the nude in art, and of lingerie in
-show windows, and of boys swimming in the river, and playing in the
-streets, and scores of other conditions which seemed to inspire in them
-the fear or the thought of evil.
-
-With the advent of spring, the mayor must put a stop to lovers
-wandering in the parks; when summer comes he must put an end instantly
-to baseball; in the winter he must close the theaters and the dance
-halls; in short, as I said before, whenever it was reported from any
-quarter that there were people having fun, the police must instantly be
-despatched to put a stop to it.
-
-And strangely enough, even when we did succeed in doing away with
-some of the evils of the town, when we closed the saloons promptly at
-midnight, the hour fixed by ordinance, when we did away with many evil
-resorts, when wine rooms were extirpated, and the number of _maisons
-de tolerance_ were reduced by eighty-five per cent., when gambling was
-stamped out, their complaints did not subside, but went on, unabated,
-the same as before. They could not be satisfied because the whole of
-their impossible program was not adopted, and more because there was
-no public recognition of their infallibility and no admission of their
-righteousness. What that type of mind desires is not, after all, any
-reasonable treatment of those conditions, or any honest and sincere
-endeavor to deal with them. It demands intellectual surrender, the
-acknowledgment of its infallibility, and a protesting hypocrite can
-more easily meet its views than anyone else.
-
-No wonder then that even such a strong man as Tom Johnson, one evening,
-when the day was done, should fling himself back in the motor car, with
-the dark shadow of utter weariness and despair on his face, and say:
-
-“I wish I could take a train to the end of the longest railway in the
-world, then go as far as wagons could draw me and then walk and crawl
-as far as I could, and then in the midst of the farthest forest lie
-down and rest.”
-
-We all have such moments, of course, but we should have fewer of them
-if we had a national trait of which I have read, in a book by Mr.
-Fielding Hall in relation to Burma. He says the Burmese have a vast
-unwillingness to interfere in other people’s affairs.
-
-“A foreigner may go and live in a Burman village,” he says, “may
-settle down there and live his own life and follow his own customs in
-perfect freedom; may dress and eat and drink and pray and die as he
-likes. No one will interfere. No one will try to correct him; no one
-will be forever insisting to him that he is an outcast, either from
-civilization or from religion. The people will accept him for what
-he is and leave the matter there. If he likes to change his ways and
-conform to Burmese habits and Buddhist forms, so much the better; but
-if not, never mind.”
-
-What a hell Burma would be for the Puritan! And what a heaven for
-everybody else! Perhaps we would all better go live there.
-
-These things, however, should be no part of a mayor’s business,
-and perhaps I may justify my speaking of them by saying that I
-spoke of them principally to make that point clear. They and some
-other problems that may or may not be foreign to his duties, have
-the effect of keeping a mayor from his real work which is or should
-be, the administration of the communal affairs of the city, and
-not the regulation of the private affairs of the people in it.
-It is quite impossible to imagine any work more delightful than
-this administration. Hampered in it as one is by politicians, who
-regard every question from the viewpoint of the parish pump, it
-is nevertheless inspiring to be concerned about great works of
-construction regarding the public comfort and convenience, the public
-health and the public amenities. It is in such work that one may catch
-a glimpse of the vast possibilities of our democracy, of which our
-cities are the models and the hope.
-
-I have observed in Germany that the mayors of the cities there are
-not burdened by these extraneous issues, and I think that that is
-the reason the German cities are the most admirably administered in
-the world. Perhaps I should say governed, too, though that is hardly
-correct, since the governing there is done by the state through its own
-officials. I have not been in Germany often enough or remained long
-enough to be able to assert that government, in its effect for good,
-is quite as much a superstition as it is everywhere; mere political
-government, I mean, which seems to be so implicitly for the selfish
-benefit of those who do the governing. But the administration of
-public affairs is so entirely another matter, that it is as beautiful,
-at least in its possibilities as government is ugly in its actualities,
-and it is precisely because there has been so much insistence on
-government in our cities that there is as yet so little administration,
-and that so inefficient.
-
-In Germany the burgomeister is not chosen for his political views,
-or for his theories of any sort, or for his popularity; he is chosen
-because of his ability for the work he is to perform, and he is
-retained in office as long as he performs that work properly. It is so
-with all municipal departments and the result is order and efficient
-administration. When a German city wants a mayor, it seeks one by
-inquiring among other cities; sometimes it advertises for him. It
-would be quite impossible, of course, for our cities to advertise for
-mayors, not that there would be any lack of applicants, since everyone
-is considered capable of directing the affairs of a city in this
-country. Of course everyone is not capable; few of the persons chosen
-are capable at the time they are chosen. Many of them become very
-capable after they have had experience, but they gain this experience
-at the expense of the public, and about the time they have gained it,
-their services are dispensed with, and a new incompetent accidentally
-succeeds them.
-
-The condition is due partly to the fact that we are of a tradition that
-is concerned with governing exclusively, and not administering; our
-conception is of an executive, a kind of lieutenant or subaltern of
-the sovereign power, and in our proverbial fear and jealousy of kings
-we see that he does not have too much power or develop those powers he
-has by a long tenure of office.
-
-The officials of a German city are pure administrators, and nothing
-else; they are not governors or censors. They are not charged in fact
-with police powers at all. And if they were, they would not have
-questions of such delicacy to meet, for the police there are for the
-purpose of protecting life and property, and they are not expected to
-regulate the personal conduct and refine the morals of the community,
-or to rear the young. They have not confused their functions with
-the _censores mores_ of old Rome, or like us, with the beadles of
-New England villages of colonial times. That is, the Puritan spirit
-is not known there, at least in the intensified acerbity in which it
-exists with us; moral problems, oddly enough, are left to parents,
-teachers or pastors. The police over there are generally a part of
-the military organizations. It would be better of course, to bear the
-ills we have than to transplant any military system to our soil, for
-state police in America would become mere Cossacks employed to keep the
-laboring population in subjection. But if the state is to undertake
-to regulate the moral conduct of the inhabitants of cities, it should
-provide all the means of regulation and take all the responsibility,
-including the onus of violating the democratic principle. If the state
-is to regenerate the land by the machinery of morals police, it should
-have its own morals police, tell them just how to proceed to compel
-the inhabitants of cities to be moral, and pay them out of the state
-treasury.
-
-
-
-
-LII
-
-
-It is, however, a curious characteristic of our people, or of the vocal
-minority of them, that while they insist on every possible interference
-with every private and personal right, in the field of moral conduct,
-they nevertheless will tolerate no interference whatever with property
-rights. Thus it was precisely as Cossacks that many employers of labor
-insisted on my using the police to cow their workmen whenever there was
-a strike.
-
-During my first term it befell that our city was torn by strikes,
-all the union machinists in town walked out, then the moulders, and
-at last a great factory wherein automobiles were made was “struck,”
-as the workingmen say. It is impossible to give an idea of the worry
-such a condition causes officials. It is more than that sensation
-of weariness, of irritation, even of disgust, which it causes the
-general public. This is due partly to the resentment created by the
-interference with physical comfort, and even peace of mind, since there
-is in us all something more than a fear of disorder and tumult, in that
-innate love of harmony which exists potentially in humanity. But to the
-official there is a greater difficulty because of the responsibility to
-which he is held. People intuitively regard strikers as public enemies,
-and while the blame for the irritation caused by strikes is visited
-on the direct and apparent cause, that is, the strikers themselves; it
-is visited, too, on the official head of the local government, who is
-supposed to be able somehow to put a stop to such things. The general
-or mass intelligence will not as yet go much deeper than the superfices
-of the problem, or seek to understand the causes of economic unrest and
-disorder; it still thinks in old sequences and puts its trust in the
-weapons of the flesh.
-
-I think I shall never forget the first call I had from a delegation
-of manufacturers during the early days of those strikes. They came in
-not too friendly spirit, but rather in their capacity of “citizens
-and tax-payers,” standing on their rights, as they understood them,
-though they in common with most of us and with the law as well, had
-only the most hazy notions as to what those rights were, and perhaps
-still hazier notions as to their duties. “We come,” said the spokesman,
-“representing two millions of dollars’ worth of property.”
-
-They could not have put their case more frankly. But I, as I was able
-to recall in that moment, represented two hundred thousand people,
-themselves among them of course. And here at the very outset was the
-old conflict in its simplest terms, of man against property. Now,
-in that old struggle, while I had made no sacrifices in the cause
-and have been of no especial service in it, I had nevertheless given
-intellectual assent to the general propositions advanced in favor of
-the human side, the side of man. By prejudice, or perversity, or
-constitutionally, I considered men of more value than factories. I had
-perhaps never heard of a strike, for instance, in which my sympathies
-were not impulsively with the strikers. I could always see that poor
-foreigner, whose body had lain there on the cold damp rocks at Lemont
-so many years before, and somehow I could not get out of my mind’s eye
-the figures of the workmen on strike, many of them hungry and desperate
-as their wives and children were; they seemed to me to be in straits
-more dire than their harried and harassed and worried employers, though
-I could feel sorry for them, too, since even if they were not hungry,
-they, too, were the victims of the anarchy of our industrial system.
-They had of course no social conscience whatever, but perhaps they
-could not help that. But there they were, bringing their troubles to
-the mayor, whom perhaps they did not wholly regard as their mayor,
-since they had some prescience of the fact that in that mayor’s mind
-was always the memory of those throngs of workingmen who had looked up
-to him with some of the emotions of confidence and hope. There was alas
-little enough that he could do for those workingmen, but, especially in
-such an hour, he must at least not forget them. Of the relative rights
-of their present quarrel he had little knowledge; but he had envisaged
-enough of life to know, without too much sentimentalizing them, that,
-while they were often wrong, they were somehow right when they were
-wrong. That is, their eternal cause was right.
-
-What the manufacturers wanted, as they put it, was “protection,” a
-term with vague and varying connotations. As was the case in all the
-strikes of all the years of my experience in the mayoralty, they felt
-that the police were not sufficiently aggressive, or that the Chief of
-Police had not detailed sufficient men to afford them protection. I
-did not raise the question, though it occurred to me, as to what the
-police were doing to protect the strikers, who were citizens, too, and
-tax-payers, or at least rent-payers and so indirect tax-payers, but
-when I asked the Chief, the big-hearted Perry Knapp reported that the
-strikers were complaining, too, and out of his collection of works
-on Lincoln, he brought me one which contained a letter the great
-president wrote to General John M. Schofield, when he assigned that
-officer to the command of the Department of the Missouri, in May, 1863,
-to succeed General Curtis. Curtis had been the head of one party as
-Governor Gamble had been the head of the other, in what Lincoln called
-the pestilent factional quarrel into which the Union men had entered.
-“Now that you are in the position,” wrote Lincoln, “I wish you to undo
-nothing merely because General Curtis or Governor Gamble did it, but to
-exercise your own judgment, and do right for the public interest. Let
-your military measures be strong enough to repel the invader and keep
-the peace, and not so strong as to unnecessarily harass and persecute
-the people. It is a difficult rôle, and so much the greater will be the
-honor if you perform it well. If both factions, or neither, shall abuse
-you, you will probably be about right. Beware of being assailed by one
-and praised by the other.”
-
-How Lincoln knew human nature! It seemed as good a model as one
-might find, since we, too, were in the midst of a little civil war,
-and we always tried to pursue that course. What the manufacturing
-employers wished, of course, was for us to use the police to break
-the strike; that we did not deem it our duty to do. What we tried to
-do was to preserve the public peace and--since our industry in its
-present status is war--to let them fight it out. We tried to see to
-it that they fought it out along the lines laid down, in fixing the
-relative rights of the industrial belligerents, by the Courts of Great
-Britain, and this policy had the virtual approval of our own courts
-when in an ancillary way it came under discussion there. But we had
-difficulty in maintaining the peace, not only because the strikers,
-or more likely their sympathizers, broke it now and then, but because
-when the strikers were not breaking it, the employers seemed bent
-on doing something to make them. They did not intend it for that
-purpose of course; they simply thought in old feudal sequences. They
-hired mercenaries, bullies provided as “guards” by private detective
-agencies. It kept the police pretty busy disarming these guards, and
-greatly added to their labors because the guards were always on the
-point of hurting some one.
-
-
-
-
-LIII
-
-
-There was one of the employers, indeed, who grew so alarmed that he
-came one morning to the office predicting a riot at his plant, that
-very afternoon at five o’clock, when the works were to shut down for
-the day. This man was just then operating his factory with strike
-breakers and he was concerned for their safety. Indeed his concern was
-expressed in the form of a personal sympathy and love for them which
-was far more sentimental than any I had ever been accused of showing
-toward workingmen. He was concerned about their inalienable right
-to work, and about their wives and little children, and about their
-comfort and peace of mind; indeed it was such a concern, such a love,
-that, had he but shown the moiety of it to his former employees, they
-never could have gone out on strike at all.
-
-At five o’clock that day then, with the Chief of Police, I visited
-the plant to observe, and if possible to prevent the impending riot.
-The works had not yet closed for the day, but in the street before
-the black and haggard and ugly buildings where they had toiled, the
-strikers were gathered, and with them their wives, with bare and brawny
-forearms rolled in their aprons, and their children clinging timorously
-about their skirts. It was a gray and somber afternoon in spring,
-but there was in the crowd a kind of nervous excitement that might
-have passed for gayety, a mood that strangely travestied the holiday
-spirit; perhaps they regarded the strike as an opportunity for the
-sensation lacking in their monotonous lives. There were several hulking
-fellows loafing about whom the Chief of Police recognized as private
-detectives, and as a first step in preventing disorder, he ordered
-these away. Presently the whistle blew its long, lugubrious blast, the
-crowd gathered in closer groups, and a silence fell. Sitting there with
-the Chief in his official buggy, I waited; the great gates of the high
-stockade swung slowly open, and then there issued forth a vehicle,
-the like of which I had never seen before, a sort of huge van, made
-of rough boards, that might have moved the impedimenta of an embassy.
-In the rear there was a door, fastened with a padlock; the sides were
-pierced with loop holes, and on the high seat beside the driver sat an
-enormous guard, with a rifle across his knees. This van, this moving
-arsenal containing within its mysterious interior the strike breakers,
-and I was told other guards ready to thrust rifles through those loop
-holes, moved slowly out of those high gates, lurched across the gutter
-into the street, and rumbled away, and as it went it was followed by
-a shout of such ridicule that even the guard on the front seat lost
-his menacing gravity and smiled himself, perhaps with some dawning
-recognition of the absurdity of the whole affair.
-
-There was no riot, though when the employer came to see me the next day
-I could assure him of my surprise that there had been none, since there
-was an invitation to disorder almost irresistible in that solemn and
-absurd vehicle, with its rifles and loop holes and guards and cowering
-mystery within. And I could urge upon him too a belated recognition of
-the immutable and unwritten law by which such an invitation to trouble
-is sure to be accepted. I almost felt, I told him, like heaving a stone
-after it myself to see what would happen. He finally agreed with me,
-dismissed his guards, and dismantled his rolling arsenal, and not long
-afterward was using its gear to haul the commodities they were soon
-manufacturing in those shops again.
-
-And the strikes in the other plants were settled or compromised, or
-wore themselves out, or in some way got themselves ended, though not
-the largest and most ominous of them, that in the automobile works,
-until my friend Mr. Marshall Sheppey and I had worked seventy-two
-hours continuously to get the leaders of the opposing sides together.
-It was an illuminating experience for both of us, and not without its
-penalties, since thereafter we were called upon to arbitrate a dozen
-other strikes. We found both sides rather alike in their humanness, and
-one as unreasonable as the other, but we found too that if we could
-keep them together long enough, their own reason somehow prevailed and
-they reached those fragile compromises which are the most we may expect
-in the present status of productive industry in this world.
-
-The old shop of Golden Rule Jones had its strike with the rest of them,
-and yet a strange and significant fate befell it. Alone of all the
-other shops and factories in the city involved in that strike, it was
-not picketed by the strikers, they did not even visit it, so far as I
-know. There were no guards and no policemen needed. And when I asked
-one of the labor leaders to account for this strange oversight, this
-surprising lack of solidarity and discipline in their ranks, he said,
-as though he must exculpate himself: “Oh well, you know--Mayor Jones.
-We haven’t forgotten him and what he was.”
-
-
-
-
-LIV
-
-
-It was because of this attitude toward workingmen, and their cause,
-that I was accused, now and then, by those who knew nothing about
-Socialism, of being a Socialist; by those who did know about it I was
-condemned for not being one. Our movement indeed had no opponents in
-the town more bitter than the Socialists, that is the authentic and
-orthodox Socialists of the class-conscious Marxist order, and they
-opposed me so insistently that I might as well have been the capitalist
-class and had done with it. I do not intend to confuse myself with
-the movement of which I, for a while, was but the merest and weakest
-of human instruments; I speak in that personal sense only because the
-opposition was of a personal quality so intense that it could hardly
-have been expected of an attitude that was always insisted upon as so
-entirely impersonal, the cold and scientific attitude of minds that had
-comprehended the whole of human history, analyzed the whole amazing
-complexity of human life, and reduced its problems to that degree
-in which they were all to be solved by a formula so brief that it
-could be printed on a visiting card. The complaint these scientists
-made of our movement was that its ameliorations in city life were
-retarding that evolution of which they were the inspired custodians and
-conservators; some of them spoke of it as though it were but a darkling
-part of that vast conspiracy against mankind in which the capitalists
-were so shamelessly engaged. If we had only let things alone, it was
-urged, they might grow so desperate that no one but the Socialists
-would be capable of dealing with the appalling situation.
-
-But this was the attitude only of that coterie which, unselfishly,
-no doubt, with the purest of motives, and only until the industrial
-democracy could be organized and rendered sufficiently class-conscious
-to take over the work, was directing the destinies of the Socialist
-party, very much to the fleshly eye in the same manner that the
-Republican machine controlled that party or the Democratic machine its
-party, or, before we were done, certain persons attempted to control
-the Independent movement. So far as I could discern, there was not
-much difference in them all; the Socialists seemed to rely on all the
-old weapons that had so long been employed in the world, and so long
-failed; they seemed to contemplate nothing more than replacement of old
-orthodoxies with new, old tyrannies with new tyrannies; in a word, to
-preserve the old vicious circle in which humanity has been revolving
-impotently and stupidly down all the grooves of time.
-
-I could not have been a Socialist because life had somehow taught me
-that this is a world of relativities, in which the absolute is the
-first impossibility. I could share, of course, their hope, or the
-hope of some of them in a well ordered society, though with many of
-them the dream seemed to be beautiful chiefly because they expected
-to order it themselves; they who felt themselves so long to have been
-the slaves were to become the masters; their hard and too logical
-theory of classes circumscribed their vision so that they could imagine
-nothing more clearly, and possibly nothing more delightful than a
-bouleversement which would leave them on top.
-
-I could recognize with them the masters under whom we all alike were
-serving in this land, and respect them as little as we might, or
-detest them as we would, they presented whatever advantage there is in
-familiarity; if nothing more inviting than a change in masters were
-proposed, one would prefer those one had to others whose habits and
-whims he did not know. One could be pretty sure that the new masters
-would use the same old whips and scorpions, or if new ones, with a
-sting more bitter. They proposed as much, indeed, in their rigid form
-of organization, with a discipline more irksome and relentless, what
-with their signing of pledges, and their visitations and committees
-of inspection, and trials for heresy and excommunications. They
-reminded me of those prosecutors who could behold no defect in the
-penal machinery save that it had not been sufficiently drastic; they
-would replace all old intolerances and ancient tyrannies by others no
-different save that they were employed in the opposing cause, and were
-to be even more intolerant and tyrannical.
-
-That is, the Socialists provided for everything in the world except
-liberty, and to one whose dissolving illusions had left nothing but the
-dream of liberty in a world where liberty was not and probably never
-was to be, there was no allure in the proposal to take away even the
-dream of liberty.
-
-None of them of course would be impressed by these objections--was not
-the great cure for social ill written and printed on a card?--nor would
-they consider them even until they had been submitted to the prescribed
-test of a joint debate, about the most futile device ever adopted
-by mankind, and a nuisance as offensive as any that ever disturbed
-society. It was of course the only amusement they had, as popular as
-running the gauntlet was with the Indians, and they liked to torture a
-capitalist to make a Socialist holiday. It is of course quite useless
-to argue with one who is always right, one whose utterances have the
-authority of revealed truth, but inasmuch as society had not yet been
-developed to a point of communal efficiency sufficient to keep the
-streets clean, it seemed idle to undertake the communal control of
-production and distribution. And however wrong I may be in every other
-thing, I am quite sure that I am right in this, that in their analysis
-of society they have failed utterly to take into account that classic
-of the ironic spirit, the great law of the contrariety of things,
-according to which the expected never happens, at least in the way
-it was expected to happen, and nothing ever turns out the way it was
-planned.
-
-But there is a more fundamental law--that of the destructive power
-of force, which always defeats itself. For their reliance was on
-force--and how quietly they, or the most virile of them, entered upon
-their last phase in their acceptance of the doctrine of force as
-preached now everywhere by the I. W. W. agitator on the curbstone!
-Sometimes after all the law does not take a thousand years to work
-itself out.
-
-It seemed to me that the single-taxers had a scheme far better
-than that of the Socialists, since they suggested a reliance on
-the democratic, and not on the authoritarian theory, though in its
-mysterious progress, in its constant development of new functions,
-democracy may be expected to modify even that theory. I fear at least
-that it would not do away with mosquitoes; possibly not even with
-reformers.
-
-
-
-
-LV
-
-
-But I would not be unfair, and I counted many friends among the
-Socialists of my town and time whose best ideals one could gladly
-share. They were immensely intelligent, or immensely informed; they had
-made a fairly valid indictment against society as it is organized, or
-disorganized. But like Mr. H. G. Wells, who calls himself a Socialist,
-these exceptions, in Mr. Wells’s words, were by no means fanatical or
-uncritical adherents. To them as to him Socialism was a noble, and yet
-a very human and fallible system of ideas. To them, as, again to him,
-it was an intellectual process, a project for the reshaping of human
-society upon new and better lines--the good will of the race struggling
-to make things better. This broad and tolerant view was the one to
-which they held, though they seemed too closely to identify all the
-good will in the race, operating, as I believe it to be, in many ways
-and through many agencies, as Socialism, and the pontifical Socialism
-taught in our town, at least, was so explicitly a class hatred that
-most of the time it was anything in the world rather than good will.
-Anyone with a good heart could be a Socialist on Mr. Wells’s terms,
-if it were not his inevitable fate to be assured by the orthodox
-custodians of the party faith, the high priests who alone could enter
-the holy of holies and bear forth, as occasion required, the ark of the
-covenant, that Mr. Wells’s Socialism is no Socialism at all and that he
-is no man to consult or accept.
-
-My friends among them were like him in the condemnation they had to
-hear from the machine, or, perhaps I should say, the governing or
-directing committee--whatever the euphemism that cloaks the familiar
-phenomenon with them--they too were said to be no Socialists at all;
-they were mere “intellectuals” or “sentimentalists,” or easily fell
-into some other of the categories the Socialists have provided for
-every manifestation of life. They have doubtless rendered society a
-service by their minute classification; which seems complete if they
-would only recognize the order of the sectarian mind, and since the
-orthodox among them afford so typical an example, include themselves
-in it. I am not sure that it is not quite as distinct a species as the
-capitalist class itself, at least it causes as much trouble in the
-world as the Socialists say the capitalist class creates. Socialists,
-at least of the impossibilist wing, evangelists, prohibitionists,
-Puritans, policemen and most of the rest of the reformers are endowed
-with this order of mind. While they all form subdivisions of a distinct
-intellectual class of humanity these are generally the same. That is,
-they are, all of them, always under all circumstances, right. All of
-these classes, fundamentally, follow the same sequences of thought.
-They differ of course in minor details, but they always meet on that
-narrow strip of ground upon which they have erected their inflexible
-model for humanity, with just room enough by its side for the scaffold
-upon which to hang those who do not accept it.
-
-Now, when, by any coincidence, the representatives of any two of
-these species meet in the mistaken supposition that there is any
-disagreement between them, there is bound to be trouble of course, and
-whenever say a Socialist of the impossibilist wing of the party, and
-a policeman--and all good policemen are impossibilists--meet, we have
-posited the old problem in physics of an irresistible body meeting an
-impenetrable substance.
-
-This phenomenon occurred on two or three occasions when policemen
-interfered with Socialists speaking in the streets. I am sure the
-Socialists in question could have regretted the circumstance no
-more than I, for if there was one right which I tried to induce the
-police to respect, it was the right of free speech. On the whole they
-did fairly well, and at a time when there seemed to be an epidemic
-of ferocity among municipal officials in the land that led them to
-all sorts of unwarranted interferences with human and constitutional
-rights, we had folk of all sorts preaching their strange doctrines
-in our streets--Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, of their several
-sorts, I. W. W.’s, evangelists, anarchists, suffragists, Mormons,
-Salvationists, to say nothing of all the religious sects; wisdom was
-veritably crying in the streets. Emma Goldman, during that period of
-hysteria when the advent of that little woman in a city precipitated a
-siege of fear, delivered her course of lectures in Toledo to audiences
-that were very small, since there were no police to insure the
-attendance of those who were interested more in sensations than in her
-philosophic discussions of the German drama. And we tried to respect
-the rights of all.
-
-But it is one thing to give orders, and another to have them implicitly
-obeyed. Those of the indurated sectarian mind, who would order all
-life by mechanism, are given to saying that if they were in authority
-the police would do so and so, and would not do such and such a thing,
-that they would have the police see to this and that, etc., etc.,
-etc. After they had been in power a while they would grow humble,
-if not discouraged, and, like me, be gratified if they succeeded in
-accomplishing about one-third of what they had hoped and planned
-to accomplish. Thus I, who had tried to give everybody the right of
-free speech, was now and then chagrined to find that someone had been
-interfered with for preaching some new heresy.
-
-The right of free speech cherished by all and exercised by none, since,
-owing to a disposition on the part of humanity to apply the hemlock
-or the noose in such cases, few say what they actually think, is one
-which certain of the Socialists preferred to have honored in the breach
-rather than in the observance. They would be never so happy, never
-so much in their element as when their address was interrupted; the
-greater the interference, the more acute the suffering for the cause,
-and when a man begins to feel that there is in him the blood of the
-martyrs, which, as he has heard somewhere, is the seed of the churches,
-why, of course, he is in such an exalted state of mind that there is no
-human way of dealing with him.
-
-And then that strange human spark, that mysterious thing we call
-personality, is always there--that element which makes impossible
-any perfectly or ideally organized state, social or otherwise. It is
-assumed by those of the order of mind under notice that it is possible
-so to organize human affairs that they will work automatically, with
-the precision of a machine, that they will work just as they are
-intended to work and in no other way, that it is, indeed, impossible
-for them to work in any other way, and that it may be predicted long in
-advance exactly how they will work at any given instant and under any
-exigency, or circumstance. This, of course, is impossible, as everybody
-knows, except the impossibilists. That is why they are impossibilists.
-
-These speakers, however, who would dehumanize everything yet cannot
-after all dehumanize themselves, would frequently court arrest in the
-belief that the meed of pseudo-martyrdom thereby made possible was
-an ornament to their cause, and they would often try the patience
-of officers, who like the speakers themselves and all of us, are
-unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, only human. Thus a Socialist
-speaker standing on his soap box, in the course of his remarks,
-indulged in certain reflections on the police as an institution.
-His sentiments in that respect were not perhaps heterodox, from the
-standpoint of my own orthodoxy, but we had been trying to create
-_esprit de corps_ in the police department, and the policeman on that
-beat chancing to arrive at that inauspicious moment, and viewing life
-from an altitude less lofty and impersonal than the Socialist claimed
-for his outlook, took the scientific statements of the Socialist not in
-the academic sense, but as a personal reflection upon the body of which
-he, it seems, was growing rather proud of being a member, and at the
-conclusion of the effort he privately informed the speaker that if he
-said anything more against the Toledo Police Department he would “knock
-his block off.” He was reprimanded by his lieutenant, even after he had
-explained that he intended to execute his rude intention in his private
-and not in his official capacity.
-
-The incident could be represented by the Socialists as a veritable
-reflection of the views of the administration on the important subject
-of Socialism, but they could not derive quite the satisfaction from
-it they had in another incident, or accident, which befell the most
-prominent and authoritative of their local leaders. He was speaking
-one evening in a crowded street, when he had the good fortune to be
-arrested by a captain of police. He made the occasion the opportunity
-for an edifying debate, and lingered as long as the captain would let
-him; but, in the end, was led to the police headquarters. This was the
-irresistible meeting the impenetrable. While everybody had a right to
-speak his mind in the streets, everybody else, we felt, had an equal
-right not to listen, even to free speech, and the police had orders to
-keep the streets and sidewalks clear for traffic. Now this captain was
-a chap who carried out orders given to him, and, as he was in command
-of the traffic squad, traffic was his specialty. If streets were to
-be cleared, then, in his philosophy, they were to be cleared, and no
-little thing like a constitutional inhibition against the abridgment
-of human speech would stand in his way. And then, after all, police
-are more apt to arrest people they do not like than those they do,
-and no one likes those who disagree with him. But after the arrest,
-the offender is turned out without chances of reparation. In this
-instance, feeling that the Socialist had had an indignity put upon
-him by his arrest, while I could not undo what had been done, I could
-order his release and tender him an official apology in writing, which
-was accepted, though not acknowledged. And an order was issued that
-a policemen who thereafter interfered with any voice crying in the
-wilderness should be dismissed from the department.
-
-
-
-
-LVI
-
-
-As a boy, thirty years ago, I used to observe, with a boy’s interest,
-the little bob-tailed street cars that went teetering and tinkling, at
-intervals of half an hour, out a long street that ran within a block
-of my home. I watched the cars intently, and so intently that the
-impressions of their various colors, sounds and smells have remained
-with me to this day, speaking, in a way, of the conditions of a small
-American city of that time, and affording a means by which to measure
-that progress in material efficiency which is so often mistaken for
-progress in speculative thought.
-
-It may have been that my interest was intensified by the fact that down
-in Urbana Street cars were unknown, though they were not unimagined,
-since we used to see them when we went to Cincinnati, and I could then,
-and I can still, recall, though time has softened the poignancy of that
-hour, the pain of parting with a certain noble horse which my father
-sold to a man of dark and hateful aspect, and of the morsel of comfort
-I derived from the stipulation, invalid enough to be sure, my father
-made with the dealer, that the horse was not to be put to street-car
-service. That, by my father, and so by me myself, was held to be the
-most cruel, degrading and ignoble fate that could befall a horse.
-But another reason for my interest was the possession of a curiosity
-to which the passing show has always been novel, generally amusing,
-sometimes pleasing and often saddening, too--a curiosity in life which
-I hope will endure fresh and wholesome until life’s largest curiosity
-shall be satisfied at the end of life.
-
-The progress of the little street car under notice was leisurely and
-deliberate, sometimes it would wait obligingly for a woman, half a
-block away, who hurried puffing, and fluttering, and waving, to reach
-the street corner, and when she had clambered aboard, the driver
-would slowly unwind his brake, cluck to his horse, the rope traces
-would strain and the car would bowl along. Ten blocks away from the
-business section, or a few blocks further on, the little car with its
-five windows and small hooded platform would enter upon a bare, though
-expectant scene of vacant lots, and about a mile out, where there
-was some lonely dwelling staring blankly and reproachfully as though
-it had been misled, and then abandoned, and further on a few small,
-expectant cottages, the long, low street-car barn was reached, the car
-was driven on to a little turntable, slowly turned about and started
-back. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I had a chance to witness the change
-of horses, and to experience a nebulous pity for the nag that ambled
-contentedly into the stable, and did not seem to be very tired after
-all.
-
-On Summit Street there were grander cars, each drawn by two horses,
-and there were other lines in town, each with its cars painted a
-distinguishing color. There was one line that went out Collingwood
-Avenue, far to the very country itself; its cars bowled under noble
-trees and even past a stately mansion or two, or what in those days
-seemed stately mansions, and it was pleasant, it was even musical,
-to hear the tinkle of the bell on the horse’s collar. Then there
-was still another line that ran down the broad Maumee River, almost
-to Maumee Bay and the “marsh” where the French _habitants_ lived,
-and spoke delightfully like the people in Dr. Drummond’s poems. On
-Saturday mornings my father was likely to send me on an errand to a
-superannuated clergyman who lived down there, and this involved a long,
-irritating journey. The journey occupied the whole morning, and spoiled
-a holiday. And then it was always cold, for, in the not too clear
-retrospect, I seem to have been sent on this particular errand only
-in winter, and the car was the coldest place in the world, especially
-when it got down where the winds from the icy lake could strike it.
-Its floor was strewn recklessly with yellow straw, in some ironical
-pretense of keeping the car warm, and I would sit there with feet
-slowly freezing in the rustling straw, and after I had inspected the
-two or three passengers, there was nothing to do but to read the notice
-over the fare-box in the front end of the car, until I had it quite by
-heart:
-
-“The driver will furnish change to the amount of Two Dollars, returning
-the full amount, thus enabling the passenger to put the exact fare in
-the box.”
-
-Then I could peer up toward the fare-box and look at the one nickel
-stranded half-way down its zig-zag chute, and look at the driver,
-standing on the front platform, slowly rocking from one foot to the
-other, bundled up in old overcoats, with his cap pulled down and his
-throat and chin muffled in a repulsive woolen scarf, hoary with the
-frost of his breath, and nothing of him visible except the shining
-red point of his frosted nose. His hands, one holding the reins, the
-other the brake-handle, were lost in the various strata of mittens that
-marked epochs co-extensive with those of the several overcoats. I had
-read once in a newspaper of a street-car driver in Indianapolis who, at
-the end of his run, never moved, but kept right on standing there, and
-when the barn-boss swore at him, it was found that he was dead, frozen
-at his post. And I sometimes wondered, as I dwelt on that fascinating
-horror, if it were possible that sometime, when the car reached the
-bay, this driver would not be found frozen. Sometimes I expected to
-be found frozen myself, but nothing exciting ever happened on that
-journey, and so, somehow, the trips out other streets and other avenues
-in other cars, remain more pleasantly in the memory, associated with
-the sunshine and the leafy arch of green overhead, with something of
-the romance and mystery of untraveled roads in the long vista ahead,
-while the winter trip down to the superannuated clergyman’s is cold and
-bleak and desolate, perhaps because it had no more interesting result
-than the few minutes I begrudged in that stiff little “parlor,” where
-the preacher received me with the not unkindly regard of eyes that
-had the dazed expression of the very old. I can expiate the perfectly
-patent and impolite reluctance with which I visited the aged man,
-and the thoughtless contempt youth has for age itself, only by the
-hope that those dim eyes have since brightened at the realization of
-those glories they had so long foreseen, which formed perhaps the only
-consolation of a life that must have had little to gladden it on that
-forbidding spot.
-
-All these lines, and others like them in the sprawling young town,
-belonged each to different men, and once I happened to hear that the
-man who owned the line first mentioned say that every new family that
-moved into that thoroughfare or built a house there, meant $73.00 a
-year to him. A good many families moved out into that street, enough
-indeed to make a settlement that was a town in itself, growing and
-spreading at the end of the line. Gradually the gaunt vacancies
-between were built up, though not, it appears, until the man had grown
-discouraged and sold out, and so suffered the universal fate of the
-pioneer. One by one the other lines in town were sold, and finally
-a day came when all the lines were owned by a certain few men, who
-under our purely individualistic legal system, formed a company and
-thus could jointly rejoice in all the individual rights and privileges
-of a person, without any of his embarrassing moral duties and
-responsibilities.
-
-I ceased to hear of the individual owner any more; I never saw him in
-his shirt-sleeves in his little office at the end of the line counting
-up the nickels of those new families which each meant $73.00 per
-annum to him, and it must have been about the same time that I began
-to hear of the traction company. There had been probably intervening
-experiments with tough mules, whom no one pitied, as everyone had
-pitied the horses they replaced, and there were, in other cities,
-astounding miracles of cable cars and elevated railways. And then
-electricity came as a motive power, and the streets were made hideous
-by the gaunt poles and makeshifts of wires, and the trolley cars came,
-and increased in size and numbers, and families swarmed, until out
-on those streets and avenues the great yellow cars went rushing and
-clanging by, with multitudes of people clinging to the straps and,
-toward evening, swarming like flies on the broad rear platforms, and
-the conductors in their blue uniforms shouting “Step lively!” with a
-voice as authoritative as that which the company spoke in the city
-councils. And the families continued to arrive, and to build houses,
-and to toil and to contribute each its $73.00 a year, though they did
-it with human reluctance and complaint, and grew dimly conscious that
-somewhere in the whole complicated transaction an injustice lurked.
-And finally this hidden injustice became the chief public concern of
-the people of the town, and an issue in local politics for more than a
-decade.
-
-
-
-
-LVII
-
-
-It had been an issue, as I have more than once said in Jones’s time and
-in his campaigns, though the issues his tremendous personality raised
-were so vast and so general and so fundamental that they included all
-issues, as Emerson said his reform included all reforms. It ran like a
-scarlet thread through the warp and woof of our communal life; it was
-somehow associated with the ambitions of the meanest politician, it
-affected the fortunes of every man in business, and it was the means
-whereby the community came to have an ideal. The long story of it, like
-the story of the same interest in any town, would include triumphs
-and tragedies--and the way of politics through the town was strewn
-with the pitiable wrecks of character and of life itself that had been
-ruthlessly sacrificed to the insatiable greed of privilege. Only the
-other day one such wreck, once in a position of honor and trust in the
-municipality, was waiting in the outer office; he wanted half a dollar
-and a place to sleep. And another like him, most desperate of all,
-asked to be committed to a city hospital or even to the asylum for the
-insane; he had no other refuge, and as for the poorhouse, he said, not
-yet, not yet! And these were the sacrifices privilege demanded of its
-parasites; though their case morally, at least, could be no worse than
-that of privilege’s principal beneficiaries; not half so bad indeed,
-since they had lost the power of appreciation of spiritual values.
-
-I knew a reporter, an Irish lad, whom one of the attorneys of privilege
-sought to “befriend.”
-
-“You work pretty hard, don’t you?” asked the attorney.
-
-“Yes,” said the Irish lad.
-
-“And your salary is small?”
-
-“Yes.”
-
-“And a mortgage on your mother’s home?” The agents of privilege always
-know a man’s necessities!
-
-“Yes.”
-
-“Well, now, I can tell you how things can be eased up a bit for you.
-For instance----”
-
-After the proposal had been artfully made, the Irish lad thought a
-moment, and then he raised those blue eyes to the old lawyer.
-
-“Your wife is prominent socially, isn’t she?”
-
-“Why, yes.”
-
-“President of--this and that, eh?”
-
-“Yes.”
-
-“And your daughters just home from a finishing school in Europe, aren’t
-they?”
-
-“Yes--but what----?”
-
-“I was wondering,” said the Irish lad, rising, “how you dared go home
-at night and look ’em in the face.”
-
-Not all men though have the character, the moral resistance of that
-Irish lad, and the scores of the weak and erring ones are the tragic
-figures in the long drama of the traction company in the city, in any
-city--the drama that cannot be written.
-
-
-
-
-LVIII
-
-
-Meanwhile, the education of the general mind went on, and we were,
-after all, tending somewhither. Our experience in the greatest of our
-tasks demonstrated that, and in the change that gradually took place in
-sentiment concerning the street railway problem, there was an evidence
-of the development of a mass consciousness, a mass will, which some
-time in these cities of ours will justify democracy. It is of course
-the most difficult process in the world, for a mass of two hundred
-thousand people to unite in the expression of a will concerning a
-single abstract proposition. The mass to be sure can now and then as it
-were rear its head and blaze forth wrath and accomplish some instant
-work of destruction; even if it be nothing more than the destruction
-of an individual reputation. That is why the recall is so popular and
-so generously and frequently employed in those cities that have it.
-In such elections, with their personal and human center of interest,
-the people all turn out, while in a referendum involving some abstract
-principle, the vote cast is always small. That is why the referendum is
-so important, and the recall, relatively, so unimportant; the use of
-the first in the long run will afford a fine schooling for the people.
-
-The most familiar expression of this rage of course was the clamor
-for the indictment and imprisonment of someone connected in sinister
-ways with the company, a demand with which I never had the slightest
-sympathy, to which I could never yield the slightest acquiescence. What
-good, though all the poor and miserable servitors of privilege were put
-in prison, while privilege itself remained? Such clamors have had their
-results; a few more broken lives, a little more sorrow and shame in the
-world, and the clamor ceases, and things go on the same as before.
-
-It is this instability, this variableness, this weariness of the
-public mind, on which privilege depends, with a cynical trust so often
-justified that it might breed cynicism in all observant and reflective
-natures. The street railway proprietors in Toledo expected each
-election to demonstrate this weariness in the people, and to restore
-them to, or at least confirm them in, the privileges they had enjoyed
-under the old régime.
-
-For a people to assume and for a decade consistently to maintain an
-attitude toward a public question therefore was a triumph of the
-democratic principle. That is what the people of Cleveland did; that is
-what the people of Detroit did; that is what the people of Toledo did.
-The successive stages of this process were most interesting to observe,
-the more especially since they caught in the movement even some of the
-street railway group and its political confreres themselves.
-
-In its origin the public will was destructive no doubt, that was the
-inarticulate disgust born of the long endurance of inadequate service,
-all the miseries of that contemptuous exploitation of the people so
-familiar in all the cities of America. To this, on the customary
-revelations of a corrupt domination of the political machinery of the
-city by the street railway company, there was added a moral rage--the
-one element needed to provide the spark for the mine. At first this
-rage against the company was such that any action taken by officials
-was popular so long as it injured or harassed or was somehow inimical
-to the company. And in consequence there was developed a kind of local
-jingoism or chauvinism; whenever popularity slackened or it was felt
-necessary to remind the electorate back in the ward of the sleepless
-vigilance of their representative in the council, a councilman had
-only to introduce some resolution that would be against the company’s
-interest. It was unfortunate, and had its evil phase, as any suggestion
-of intellectual dishonesty must ever have, and it made serious dealing
-with the subject extremely difficult and hazardous. It was difficult to
-recognize any of the company’s rights; and it was always at the risk
-of misunderstanding, and with the certainty of misrepresentation that
-this was done. But of course it was necessary to do this, in the course
-of the long and complicated transaction, that constant and inflexible
-opposition of the public with the private interest which now assumed
-the aspect of a noisy and furious war, and now the softer phases of
-diplomatic negotiations. Of course there were always those in town
-who knew exactly what was to be done; they could settle the vexatious
-problem with a facile gesture, between the whiffs of a cigarette on the
-back platform of a street car, or in an after dinner speech between
-the puffs of a cigar. The one was apt to advise that the “traction
-company be brought to time at once,” the other that an “equitable”
-settlement be “arranged” by conservative business men. Meanwhile the
-problem obviously consisted in the necessity of recognizing the private
-right in the proprietors and of securing the public right to the
-people, and to do this it was necessary to search out, and isolate,
-like some malignant organism, the injustice that somewhere lurked in
-this complex and irritating association.
-
-In my first campaign we proposed to grant no renewal of franchises at
-a rate of fare higher than three cents. Jones had advised it, and I
-had been committed to it long before. It was Tom Johnson’s old slogan,
-and it was popular. I used to explain to the crowds my own conviction
-that the problem never would be settled until we had municipal
-ownership, but there was in Toledo in those days very little sentiment
-for municipal ownership, and my conviction met with no applause, and
-was received only with mild toleration. In the second campaign, there
-was more indorsement; in the third there was a certain enthusiasm for
-the principle, in the fourth it seemed to be almost unanimous, and
-now the principle has become one of the cardinal articles of faith. I
-do not wish it to appear that I had converted all these people to my
-view; I had not tried to do that, and doubtless could not have done so
-had I tried, but the conviction came by the very necessities of the
-situation.
-
-
-
-
-LIX
-
-
-Those men who ventured early into the street-car business were
-pioneers; they assumed large risks, and they rendered a public service.
-They had the courage to undertake experiments; they had faith that the
-town would grow and become in time a city. And they staked all on the
-chance. They had little difficulty, if they had any at all, in securing
-franchises from the city to use the streets, for the people of the city
-were glad to have the convenience of transportation. Indeed many of
-the lines were community enterprises, organized by the men of a given
-neighborhood for the sake of the transportation merely, and not with
-any notion of personal profit.
-
-Franchise ordinances then were loosely drawn; men had no conception of
-what changes the future was to bring about, they lacked the imagination
-to prefigure it, the faith to believe it, and so the street-car
-promoters who came along a little later were the heirs of advantages
-which otherwise they would not have obtained. Under these advantages,
-these privileges, they or their immediate grantees were enabled to take
-over for their own use and profit the enormous social values that were
-being created in cities, not by them, but by all those families who
-moved in, and toiled, and wrought and built the modern city.
-
-This was the first phase of the street-car business, its experimental
-stage, commensurate with the rapid, disordered growth of the city in
-the middle and western states of America. Few indeed of the pioneers
-in the business became wealthy; many no doubt lost their money, though
-they tried in vain to vary or improve their fortunes through the
-changes that were rapidly developing the mighty problem of transporting
-the crowded populations of our cities. There were, for instance, the
-days when mules were substituted for horses, and sacrificed rapidly and
-ruthlessly on the principle that it was cheaper to replace them than
-to care for them, a system about as bad in its consuming cruelty as
-that adopted by some factories with reference to their human employees.
-Then, in a few of the larger cities, there were the cable cars, but the
-second phase came with the adoption of electricity as a motive power,
-and the coincident development, almost a miracle, of the towns of
-middle and western America into real cities.
-
-With electricity as a motive power, and the consequent cheapening of
-operation, the street-car business entered upon its second phase, and
-it ushered in at once the era of speculation in franchises and social
-values, watered stocks and bonds. The era of exploitation came upon us,
-and out of these privileges, out of other privileges to conduct other
-public utilities, i. e., privileges to absorb social values, enormous
-fortunes were made, with all the evils that come with a vulgar,
-newly-rich plutocracy. To keep, and extend, and renew these privileges,
-they must have their lawyers, and their newspapers to mislead and
-debauch the public mind; they must go into politics, organize and
-control the machines of both parties, bribe councilmen and legislators
-and jurors, and even have judges on the bench subservient to their
-will, so that the laws of the state and the grants of the municipality
-might be construed in their favor. The sordid, tragic tale of their
-domination of municipal politics is now universally known, and in
-the tale may be read the causes of most of our municipal misrule. It
-happened in Toledo as it happened everywhere, such is the inexorability
-of the general law, and the popular reaction was the same.
-
-And so we came upon a new, the third stage, since I have set out to be
-scientific in analysis of tractions, and the very name by which these
-big enterprises have latterly been called, that is, public service
-corporations, suggests the meaning and indicates the significance of
-that era. Two facts, or principles, had become perfectly apparent;
-first, that transportation, the primal necessity of a modern city, is
-a natural monopoly, and must be treated as such. Second, that if these
-public utility corporations are to continue to hold these monopolies,
-they must become public service corporations indeed, that is, they must
-serve the public. No more, then, the old corporation contempt of the
-people, at least outwardly expressed, but a softer voice in addressing
-them, and a new respect, perhaps grown sincere. Their old lobbyists
-disappeared from the council chamber and the city hall--for eight years
-they were not seen there. The companies had been primarily profit
-making institutions and only incidentally for public service, they were
-operated for the private benefit of their owners in contempt of public
-right; the service was secondary.
-
-We may say that this third era is the era of regulation, or, as it
-is more apt to be, attempted regulation, by the city, in which the
-principle of the public interest as paramount to the private interest
-is to be the basis on which a private company shall be permitted to
-operate. This era will endure long enough to demonstrate itself a
-failure, the general mind will continue to learn, to inform itself,
-democracy will develop new functions, and we shall enter on the fourth,
-and perhaps the final stage, that of municipal ownership.
-
-
-
-
-LX
-
-
-We came upon the scene just when the discussion was emerging from the
-second into the third of those phases into which I have divided the
-development of the problem. The franchises granted almost a generation
-before were about to expire, and new arrangements between the city
-and the traction company, the Big Con, as the newspaper argot would
-have it. Chicago had already, or almost, gone through her settlement;
-and though the settlement was pretty bad, it nevertheless recognized
-the principle that the value of a street railway franchise is a
-public, social, or communal value, produced by the community, and
-therefore belonged to the community. In Toledo the company had but
-about $5,000,000 of actual investment, while it had a capitalization
-in stocks and bonds of nearly $30,000,000, and the difference of
-$25,000,000 was the community value which the magnates had been
-exploiting for their own benefit. We simply proposed that this value
-should be returned to the people. We proposed, then, that the rate
-of fare to be charged by the company should be large enough and only
-large enough to pay a reasonable return on the actual investment and
-to provide good service, a service that was to be dictated, regulated
-and controlled by the city. This principle had been established, or
-at least admitted in the Chicago settlement, and the same thing had
-been done, though on a sounder and more scientific basis in Cleveland,
-where Tom Johnson’s long and gallant and intelligent contest already
-in effect had been won. Over in Detroit the same principles had been
-deduced, though the discussion there was so prolonged, as proved
-ultimately to be the case in Toledo, that the people demanded municipal
-ownership, without passing through the intervening experimental stage
-of regulation and control.
-
-There is of course nothing sacrosanct in three-cent fares. The movement
-of the people, which at the same time, in the old Russian phrase of
-Kropotkin, was a movement toward the people, had become an agitation
-for this rate. It had been begun years before by Mayor Pingree in
-Detroit, and was taken up in Cleveland by Tom Johnson, whose whole
-career in a romantic manner, at once embodied and illustrated the
-history of the street railway problem in the American city. The
-adoption of the phrase as a shibboleth or slogan of the progressive
-forces was simply and easily explained, for in the mind of Johnson and
-in the minds of those who were like him or were influenced by him, the
-difference between the prevailing fare of five cents and the proposed
-fare of three cents somehow measured the franchise value, or that
-social value which belonged to the people. Tom Johnson, indeed, used
-often to say that he favored a three-cent fare simply because it was
-two cents nearer nothing, thereby revealing a glimpse of his dream of
-a social order in which the municipality would provide transportation
-just as it provides sidewalks, sewers, bridges, etc., all of which are
-paid for at the treasury in taxes. It was believed and held by all of
-us, that this franchise value should be reclaimed or retained by the
-people in this direct and simple manner of lowering the fare.
-
-There was never any notion, of course, of interfering in any way with
-the existing rights of the company; it was to have all that to which it
-was entitled under its old franchises or contracts. But it was proposed
-that when we came to draw a new contract, the political relations
-of the city and the company were to be considered as of paramount
-importance, using the word “political,” of course in its old authentic
-sense, and not as expressing in any wise the sinister thing it has come
-to connote in the popular mind. We were determined to meet not only the
-conditions of the present, but to do what our forerunners in office
-had never done, that is, to protect the interests of the people of the
-future. I suppose this sounds very much like the trite generalities
-of the politician, but we sincerely tried to express the theory with
-definiteness and particularity. We sought not only a reduction of
-the fare and a regulation of the service in the public interest, but
-we wished to provide for that future day when, as a result of the
-certain growth of the city, the sure improvement in transportation
-facilities, and the inevitable development of the democratic function,
-the municipality is to undertake these enterprises as a proper public
-function.
-
-It was these principles we tried to bear in mind in those long
-negotiations which we held all during the months of one spring and
-summer over that big table in the council chamber. We were nervous when
-we entered upon this work, nervous as are those who enter the finals
-in some tournament of sport; we did not know much about the subject,
-and we were confronted by the street railway magnates and their clever
-lawyers. But we could learn as we went along, and we always had to our
-assistance Newton Baker over in Cleveland, and Peter Witt, and Carl
-Nau, whom we had employed as the city’s accountant when the time came
-at last when we could examine the company’s books; they had all gone
-through the long civil war in Cleveland, as had Professor Edward W.
-Bemis, whom we afterwards engaged in his quality of expert adviser on
-valuations.
-
-Perhaps at first we laid too great stress on three-cent fares, though
-I do not know how we could have done otherwise. Dr. Delos F. Wilcox,
-who has written an excellent work on the whole subject, had advised us
-indeed that a disproportionate amount of energy and effort had already
-been expended--not by us, only, but by all those in other cities who
-were in similar struggles--in the direction of low fares. He pointed
-out, I remember, that five cents in that day was worth little more
-than three cents or three and a half cents had been a decade before,
-according to the scale of prices then current; he thought that in
-terms of general prices the public had already secured three-cent
-fares without knowing it. It was a question of some subtlety and
-some intricacy, to be left to economists; we could not feel that our
-battle had been won so easily, and we did not undertake to console
-the people with the recondite theory. We had before us, in vision,
-and sometimes in their corporeal reality, the weary and exasperated
-strap-hangers, and the human sardines on the rear platform with their
-valid complaints; they all wanted low fares, good service, and seats.
-An old street-car man once said that to provide seats for everybody is
-an impossibility, and to prove this assertion he humorously classified
-humanity into three groups: “workers, clerkers and shirkers.” Each
-morning, he said, the workers go down at seven, the clerkers at eight,
-and the shirkers at nine, and that therefore it is easy to provide them
-all with seats in the morning hours; but that as all three classes
-wish to go home at the same hour in the evening, it is then physically
-impossible to provide them all with seats.
-
-But whether or not too great stress was three-cent fares we learned
-during those months of wearisome and futile negotiations, that the
-theory was not scientific. The people were entitled to their money’s
-worth in service, the company to adequate pay for the service it
-rendered, and as the basis of the whole transaction was a public
-necessity, the city had the right to control the service, to dictate
-what it should be. The old theory was that the people existed for
-the street-car company; the new principle was quite the reverse; the
-street-car company was but a temporary instrument of social service,
-and the social right was paramount to all others.
-
-The company therefore was entitled to a fare sufficient to enable
-it to provide the service thus demanded, and to do this it must
-charge enough to pay its operating expenses, taxes, and interest,
-enough to meet the cost of improvements and depreciation, and to
-pay a reasonable return on its investment. It was not entitled to
-any speculative return. There was no longer on the company’s part
-that risk its predecessors in interest, the pioneers or promoters or
-whatever they were, had been compelled to take; its investment was no
-longer precarious; nothing, indeed, could be more certain than the
-stability of street railway investments. Their securities, based upon
-a public necessity, supported by the diurnal comings and goings of all
-those thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, had become in a
-certain very real sense, a fixed burden upon the people of the city,
-a burden as fixed and inevitable as taxes. In the hands of private
-owners such securities, under a franchise ordinance properly drawn,
-partake largely of the character of municipal bonds, which indeed
-they resemble in fundamentals and ends. The issue of securities was
-therefore to be as jealously guarded as an issue of municipal bonds,
-and overcapitalization, the prolific source of so much evil, was to be
-prevented. The enterprise had become as stable as any human institution
-can be, and with the limited risk there was to be applied the
-familiar principle of limited profit. The principle was recognized in
-Cleveland, where the return fixed as reasonable was 6 per cent., which
-is but little more than municipal bonds pay. And when this principle
-is established, municipal ownership almost automatically follows;
-investors used to large speculative profits, are ready to sell out to
-the municipality; thus, by indirection, democracy comes into her own.
-
-It was easy enough to fix most of the elements of this return; the
-accountants could do that, in their intricate discussions of car-miles
-and curves and straight lines of depreciation and points of saturation
-in traffic, and all that, but the tremendous difficulty was to
-determine just what the investment was and what was a reasonable return
-on that investment.
-
-It is this pass to which all such negotiations, conducted in sincerity,
-come at last; it is this on which the whole question hinges, it is
-this that might as well be done first as last, namely, to evaluate
-the property of the company. It is necessary not only to get at the
-investment and the return thereon, but to ascertain what the city must
-pay when it comes to take over the street railway system.
-
-But we did not do it at first, and we did not do it at last. At first
-it was impossible to get it into the councilmanic head that it was at
-all necessary, especially since it cost money to retain the “experts,”
-as they are called, to do the work. They were prone to that old vice
-of the human mind which leads it to imagine that when it has stated
-the end to be achieved it has at the same time stated the means of
-achieving it,--like the advice to the bashful man “to assume an easy
-and graceful attitude, especially in the presence of ladies”--and
-when council was finally convinced and had provided the funds for the
-experts, we could not agree as to who should be employed. That is, the
-human equation was apparent. There was unhappily nobody but men to make
-evaluations, and all the engineers who were competent were employed
-by street railway companies, and expected or hoped to continue to be
-employed by street railway companies, and they had evolved so many
-fantastic notions of “intangible” value that they could account for
-almost any excess in artificial capitalization, and make the grossest
-exhibition of corporate greed in watering stocks appear like veritable
-self denial in frugality and economy. We selected Professor Bemis to
-represent the city, because he was one of the few of the “experts”
-committed to the people’s cause; he had advised Tom Johnson throughout
-his long war. But the company never could be brought to select anybody,
-or to agree upon the third arbiter--even to accept the Judge of the
-United States Circuit Court when, against the advice of the whole
-administrative circle, I proposed him.
-
-Again and again in our prolonged negotiations we returned, as in a
-vicious circle, to this point; again and again we reached this impasse.
-
-
-
-
-LXI
-
-
-Meanwhile, the franchises were expiring, and the time drew on when
-the company would have no rights left in the streets. And here was
-the opportunity for the mind that had the power, or the defect, of
-isolating propositions, of regarding them as absolute, of ignoring
-the intricate relativity of life. “Put the company off the streets,”
-was the cry; “make it stop running its cars; bring it to its knees.”
-However, we could not bring the company to its knees without bringing
-the riders to their feet; we could not put the company off the streets,
-without at the same time and by the same process, putting the people on
-the streets; when the cars stopped running the people began walking.
-The public convenience was paramount.
-
-Then Mr. Cornell Schreiber, the City Solicitor, hit upon a plan. He
-drew an ordinance providing that the company could use the streets
-wherein its rights had expired, only on the condition that it carry
-passengers at a three-cent fare, and the ordinance was at once passed
-by the council. It was of doubtful legality, but it had its effect in
-a world of human beings. Before it was effective even, people were
-tendering three cents as fare; and in the face of the difficulty of
-dealing with a whole populace in this mood, the company agreed to put
-in force a temporary rate of three cents during the rush hours of the
-morning and evening, and it lowered fares in the other hours and made
-further concessions. And there we let the matter rest.
-
-And, since the education of the general mind never stops, the people
-were learning. Their patience was time and again exhausted by the
-unavoidable length of the franchise dispute, for the problem was
-to them, as to most Americans, new, the legal questions in which
-the whole subject was prolific had not been settled, there was the
-interruption of business and convenience and pleasure attending long
-continued negotiations, and perhaps more than all that irritation
-of the public temper which proceeds from all communal disputes. The
-company’s representatives counted on all this to tire the people out;
-and since the controversy assumed a political complexion, and there was
-as always the difficulty of sustaining the mass will, they had hopes
-that by delay the people in weariness would surrender. The time came
-when the sentiment in favor of municipal ownership was so strong that
-the Independents adopted the view I had expressed and declared it to be
-their purpose to grant no renewals of franchises at all, but to let the
-company operate on sufferance until the city itself could take over the
-lines.
-
-During the course of the long struggle a change had come over the
-spirit of the people, and this change had been reflected in the laws.
-The greatest difficulty had been found in the city’s want of autonomy;
-the cities of Ohio not only lacked the power to own and operate public
-utilities, but they even had few rights in contracting with the private
-companies. The street-car companies had always been more ably and
-assiduously represented in the state legislature than had the people
-themselves; the people had not had the strength to wrest these powers
-from the legislature, and indeed, in their patience and toryism, they
-had not made many efforts to do so. Thus our campaign led us out into
-the state, and the end, toward which we had to struggle, was the free
-city; the last of our demands was home rule. In the relations between
-public utility corporations and the municipality, our cities were a
-whole generation behind the cities of Great Britain, Germany, France
-and Belgium. Indeed, in relation to all social functions we were not
-much further advanced than was Rome in the second century.
-
-As to the medieval cities of Italy, the free cities of Germany and the
-cities of Great Britain, struggling all of them against some overlord,
-some king, noble or bishop, so at last there came to our cities a
-realization of the vassalage they were under. Their destinies were in
-the hands of the country politicians in the state legislature who had
-no sympathy with city problems, because they had no understanding of
-them. Oftenest indeed they had a contempt for them, they all held to
-the Puritan ideal. But a demand for freedom went up from Cleveland,
-from Cincinnati, from Columbus, from Toledo. The legislature began
-to make its reluctant concessions; it gave cities, for instance, the
-right to have street railway franchises referred to the people for
-approval or rejection. And at last in the great awakening, the state
-constitution was ultimately amended and cities were given home rule. It
-was the irony of life that Golden Rule Jones and Tom Johnson could not
-have lived to see that day!
-
-
-
-
-LXII
-
-
-A few weeks after my election to a fourth term I wrote out and gave
-to the reporters a statement in which I said that I would not be
-again a candidate for the office of mayor. I had been thinking of my
-old ambition in letters, and of those novels I had planned to write.
-Already I had been six years in office and I had not written a novel
-in all that time. And here I was, just entering upon another term. If
-ever I were to write those novels I would better be about it, before
-I grew too old and too tired. The politicians, regarding all such
-statements as but the professional insincerities of their trade, could
-not consider my decision seriously of course, or credit its intention.
-They were somewhat like my friends in the literary world, or like
-some of them at least, who were unable to understand why I should not
-continue indefinitely to run for mayor, though the politicians were not
-so innocent and credulous, since they did not believe that I could as
-inevitably continue to be elected. I suppose it was the life of action
-that appealed to my literary friends or to their literary imaginations;
-they had the human habit of disparaging their own calling, and, if they
-did not hold my performance in that field as lightly as the politicians
-held it, they wondered why I did not prefer politics. The politicians
-in their harangues spoke of my writings bitterly, as though they were
-a personal affront to their intelligences, and urged the electorate to
-rebuke me for spending my time upon such nonsense. If I had not known
-that they had never read my books, or any books, all this might have
-been chilling to the literary aspiration, but I knew them to their
-heart’s core, where there was nothing but contempt for books, and, as I
-sometimes thought, yielding too much to cynicism and despair, nothing
-but contempt for any sort of beauty or goodly impulse. Of course, they
-were not so bad as that; out of politics they were as good as anyone or
-as anything; we instinctively recognize the vitiating quality of the
-political atmosphere in our constant use of the phrase “if it could
-only be taken out of politics,” as with the tariff, the currency,
-municipal government, etc. But my friends in the political line could
-join my friends in the literary line in the surprise they felt at my
-decision to retire at the end of that last term. The politicians did
-not think I meant what I said, of course; it is quite impossible for a
-politician to imagine a man’s meaning what he says, since politicians
-so seldom mean what they say themselves; they considered it merely
-as bad politics to have said such a thing at all. “It’ll embarrass
-you when you run again,” they would warn me in their bland _naïveté_.
-It did not embarrass me, however, because I would not and did not
-run again, though I had to decline a nomination or two before they
-were convinced, but their own lack of faith, those who were still
-Independents, at least, proved an ultimate embarrassment to them, for
-they neglected to agree upon a candidate to succeed me, and by the next
-election they had grouped themselves in factions, each with its own
-candidate. Perhaps this untoward result came to pass as much because
-the independent movement by that time had become the Independent party,
-as for any other reason discernible to the mind of man; at least, it
-was disparaged by the use of that term, which implied its own reproach
-in Toledo, and its sponsors conducted themselves so much after the
-historic precedents of faction in political parties, by separating into
-the inevitable right and left wing, that they managed to get themselves
-soundly beaten.
-
-Eight years is a long time to serve in any office. My grandfather
-had given four years to the Civil War, and I had found the mayor’s
-office as trying, as difficult, and as alien as he had found his
-martial experience. The truth is, that long before the eight years
-were over the irritation of constant, persistent, nagging criticism
-had got on my nerves, and, besides the pain of misunderstanding and
-misrepresentation, I grew to have a perfect detestation for those
-manipulations which are the technic of politics. And, then, one cannot
-be a mayor always, and it were better to retire than to be dismissed.
-
-“But I thought you didn’t mind criticism?” a man said to me one day. “I
-always supposed that after a while one became callous.”
-
-My dear friend Bishop Williams of Detroit was at the table, and I shall
-ever be grateful to him for the smile of instant comprehension and
-sympathy with which he illuminated the reply he made before I had time
-to speak.
-
-“Yes, callous,” he remarked, “or--raw.”
-
-It was precisely that. There were those who were always saying to me:
-“I know you don’t mind what they say about you, but I never could stand
-it; I’m too sensitive.” It was a daily experience, almost as difficult
-to endure as the visits of those who came to report the latest
-ill-natured comment; they did it because they were friends and felt
-that I should know it. But Bishop Williams knows life and understands
-human nature more completely and more tolerantly than any clergyman I
-ever knew.
-
-And then politics have the dreadful effect of beating all the freshness
-out of a man; if they do not make him timid, they make him hesitant
-and cautious, provident of his opinion; he goes about with his finger
-on his lips, fearful of utterance, and, when he does speak, it is
-in guarded syllables which conceal his true thought; he cultivates
-solemnity and the meretricious art of posing; humor is to be avoided,
-since the crowd is perplexed by humor and so resents it, and will have
-only the stale rudimentary wit of those stories which men, straining to
-be funny, match at the banquet board. And when he indulges himself in
-public speech it is to pour forth a tide of words,
-
-          Full of sound and fury,
-  Signifying nothing.
-
-I used to be haunted continually by a horrid fear that I should lose
-the possibility of ever winning the power of utterance, since no such
-prudence is at all compatible with the practice of any art. For art
-must, first of all, be utter sincerity, the artist’s business is to
-think out his thoughts about life to the very end, and to speak them
-as plainly as the power and the ability to speak them have been given
-to him; he must not be afraid to offend; indeed, if he succeed at all,
-he must certainly offend in the beginning. I am quite aware that I may
-seem inconsistent in this notion, since I have intimated my belief
-that Jones was an artist; and so he was, in a way, and, if I do not
-fly to the refuge of trite sayings and allege him as the exception
-that proves the rule, I am sure that I may say, and, if I have in the
-least been able to convey any distinct conception of his personality,
-the reader will agree with me when I say, that he was _sui generis_.
-And besides it was not as a politician that he won his success. Had
-he ventured outside the political jurisdiction of his own city the
-politicians instantly would have torn him asunder because he had not
-been “regular.” And, that, I find, when I set it down, is precisely
-what I am trying to say about the artist; he must not be regular.
-Every great artist in the world has been irregular, as irregular as
-Corot, going forth in the early morning in search of the elusive and
-ineffable light of dawn as it spread over the earth and stole through
-the greenwoods at Barbizon, or as Manet, or Monet, or any other man who
-never knew appreciation in his lifetime. And Jones and all like him are
-brothers of those incomparable artists; they are not kin in any way to
-the world’s politicians.
-
-And then so many of the old guard were dead. A strange and tragic fate
-had pursued us, overtaking, one after another, our very best--Jones,
-first of all, and then Oren Dunham, E. B. Southard, Dad McCullough,
-Franklin Macomber, Lyman Wachenheimer, Dr. Donnelly, William H. Maher.
-These brave, true souls were literally burned out in the fires of that
-fierce and relentless conflict, and then there came that soft autumn
-night when seven of our young men in a launch were run down by a
-freighter on Maumee Bay and drowned, every one of them.
-
-I shall never forget Johnson Thurston as he sat in my office during
-that last campaign, recalling these men who had been to him as comrades
-in arms, and, what affected him more sorely, the fact that in our
-overabundant political success the ideals that had beckoned them on had
-become blurred in the vision of those who came after them. I detected
-him in the act of drawing his handkerchief furtively from his pocket,
-and hastily pressing it to his eyes, as he stammered something in
-apology for his emotion....
-
-Thus there came the irresistible conviction that the work of the
-politician was not for me. There was other work I wished to do. I
-doubt whether the politician’s work is ever permanent, though it is
-too much to say that it lacks real value; I have never been able to
-think it out. The work of few men, of course, is permanent, sometimes
-the work of the artist least of any. But, however ephemeral, if the
-artist’s work is done in sincerity, it is of far greater worth than the
-work of the politician, if for no other reason, than because, to recall
-again those words of George Moore which can never lose their charm or
-their consolation, the traffic of the politician is with the affairs of
-this world, while the artist is concerned with the dreams, the visions,
-and the aspirations of a world that is beyond this. I have quoted them
-before in these pages, I know; they cannot be quoted too often, or too
-often read by us Americans, if, by pondering them, we may plumb their
-profound depths. For we all read human history too superficially. Kings
-and emperors, princes and dukes, prime ministers and generals may
-fascinate the imagination for a while, but if life is ever to unfold
-its possibilities to the later consciousness, these become but the
-phantoms of vanished realms, and there emerge more gracious figures,
-Phidias and Theocritus; Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; Raphael,
-Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Correggio; Donatello and Michelangelo;
-Sidney, Spenser, Tyndale, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. These and the
-other artists and humanists of their times are veritable personalities
-in our world, far more than Elizabeth, or the dukes of the Medici,
-or even Pericles. For from periods such as these their names made
-illustrious, from the Revival of Learning, the Renaissance, the
-Reformation, man emerged as Man, clothed with the beauty and power of
-an emancipated spirit. In the freedom of the mind, the spontaneous
-outburst of ecstasy and delight, the new-born possibility of loveliness
-and harmony and joyous existence, they not only exalted life with
-art, but gained the courage to undertake sterner examinations of its
-mystery. And this same perennial spirit of humanism built, not only the
-proud and voluptuous cities of Tuscany and Lombardy, but the wealthy
-free cities of Flanders and Germany--and it discovered America, not the
-America of the senses alone, but the larger, nobler America of the mind.
-
-And, surely, this America is not always to bear the reproach of having
-no music, and so little painting and literature of her own. Surely
-the aspirations of this new land, with the irresistible impulse of
-the democratic spirit and humanistic culture are to find emotional
-expression in the terms and forms of enduring beauty. It was this
-sublime adventure that interested me far more than the trivial and
-repulsive wrangles of the politicians....
-
-Our opponents had never known how wholly right they were in their
-reiterated charge that I was but a dreamer; incorrigible dreamer
-indeed, and nothing more!
-
-But in these years I had given my city the best there was in me,
-little as that was, and when the legislature made provision for the
-constitutional convention, which met at Columbus, and, after months of
-deliberation, submitted a long list of amendments to the fundamental
-law of the state, among them that one which granted home rule to
-cities, I felt, for it was an emotion deeper than thought, that if
-the people could only be induced to approve that amendment the long
-anticipated and happy release was at hand. We had been engaged on an
-impossible task; we had been trying to regenerate the city by means
-of electing to office persons who in themselves would reflect the
-communal aspiration, but this could not be continued indefinitely; the
-cities could achieve no genuine reform until they were autonomous.
-With home rule democracy would have the means of development, and the
-people the opportunity of self-expression; they would have to depend on
-themselves; they could no longer, with an Oriental fatalism, neglect
-their own destiny and then lay the blame for the inevitable catastrophe
-on the mayor, or the political boss, or the country members of the
-legislature.
-
-There were, if I remember well, about fifty of these amendments, among
-them provisions for the initiative and referendum, woman suffrage,
-and many other progressive and radical doctrines, in addition to our
-beloved home rule for cities, and, when the campaign opened in behalf
-of their adoption, Newton Baker, who a year before had been elected
-mayor of Cleveland, proposed that he and I make a tour of the state in
-a motor car and speak for the home rule amendment, since all the others
-had their devoted proponents.
-
-Nothing more delightful than a campaign tour in company with Newton
-Baker could be imagined, and I had visions of our little caravan,
-out on the country roads of Ohio, going from town to town, and of
-our standing up in the car and speaking to the crowds of farmers who
-had come into the town to hear us, or having come for their Saturday
-marketing, would pause while we told them of the needs of cities. I had
-always believed that if the farmers could only be brought to understand
-the cities they would not be so obdurate with us, but would enlarge our
-opportunities of self-expression and self-government. I could fancy
-myself standing up and leaning over the side of the car and talking to
-them, while they stood there in their drab garments, their faces drawn
-in mental concentration, looking at us out of eyes around which were
-little wrinkles of suspicion, wondering what designs we had upon them;
-at first they would stand afar off, perhaps on the other side of the
-street, as they used to do when we went out to speak to them in the
-judicial campaigns; but then presently they would draw a little closer,
-until at last they crowded about the car, staying on to the end, and
-then perhaps even vouchsafing us the conservative approval of scattered
-applause. Or I would dramatize Baker as speaking, while I sat there
-utterly charmed with his manner, his clear and polished expression,
-and envied him his ability to speak with such surprising fluency,
-such ease and grace, as if the fact of putting words together so that
-they would form clear, logical and related sentences were nothing
-at all, and wondering why it was that everyone that heard was not
-instantly converted to his plan, whatever it was.... And then, between
-times, Baker would not be talking politics at all; he would not be
-indulging in politician’s low gossip, slandering every one he knew--the
-ineradicable and, I suppose, inevitable habit of politicians, because
-in public they are obliged to be so suave in utterance and so smiling
-and ingratiating in manner. Baker was not like them at all; he knew a
-vast deal of literature and could talk about books with comprehension;
-if you mentioned a passage from John Eglinton, or a scene from
-Tourgenieff, or a poem of Yeats or Masefield, he would know what you
-were talking about; he is not one of those who, by the little deceit of
-a thin, factitious smile of appreciation, pretend an acquaintance they
-have never enjoyed. Baker has been able to keep the habit of reading,
-even in politics, a singular achievement. Only he would not read novels
-that were in the somber or tragic manner; I used to tell him that this
-was a sign he was growing old, since only the buoyancy of youth can
-risk its spirit in such darkened paths. For instance, he would never
-read my novel about prisons, “The Turn of the Balance”; he said he knew
-it was too terrible. But I did not reproach or blame him. I no longer
-like to read terrible books myself, since life is....
-
-But that pretty scheme fell through, our tour was abandoned, and we
-went separate ways, though we did have the joy of speaking together on
-several occasions, once here in Toledo, where we opened the campaign
-in old Memorial Hall, and again in a town down the state, and at last
-in two great meetings in Cleveland, where they got out the old tent
-Johnson had used in his campaigns, and the audiences its canvas walls
-sheltered, there under the flaring torches, were inspired by his
-spirit as once they had been by his presence, and with the enthusiasm
-of them fresh in my heart I set out from Cleveland that last week of
-the campaign for the long drive to Columbus, where the campaign was to
-close.
-
-It was a hot day in early September; the clouds were piled high in
-the west as we started, and the air was suffocating in its dense
-humidity; plainly it was to be a day of thunder and lightning and
-tropical showers. My friend, Henry W. Ashley, who understands democracy
-to the fundamentals (his father was the friend of Lincoln and wrote
-the Fifteenth Amendment), was with us, for he was ever an interested
-spectator of our politics. We went by the way of Oberlin because
-Ashley wished to see the college campus and indulge some sentimental
-reflections in a scene that had been so vitally associated with the old
-struggle of the abolitionists. The storm which had been so ominously
-threatening all the morning broke upon us as we slowly made our way
-through the country south of Oberlin, as desolate a tract as one could
-find, and we were charged as heavily with depression as were the clouds
-with rain as we thought of the futility of attempting to convince
-the inhabitants of such a land that they had any responsibility for
-the problems that were vexing the people in the cities of the state.
-I remember a village through which we passed; it was about noon,
-according to our watches, though, since in the country the people
-reject Standard time and regulate their leisurely affairs by “God’s
-time,” noon was half an hour gone, and, after their dinners, they were
-seeking the relaxation they did not seem to need. The rain had ceased,
-and on the village green under the clearing sky the old men had come
-out to pitch horseshoes. Among them was a patriarch whose long white
-beard, stained with the juice of the tobacco he resolutely chewed,
-swept the belt of his slack trousers; he was in bare feet. The human
-foot after it has trod this earth for three score years and ten is not
-a thing of beauty, and Ashley joked me, as we labored in the mud of
-those deplorable roads, for my temerity in hoping that we could convert
-that antediluvian to our way of thinking.
-
-Had the task been wholly mine I should not have undertaken it, and, of
-course, in that instance I did not attempt it; the old barefoot quoit
-player stood to us a symbol of the implicit and stubborn conservatism
-of the rural districts. But there were others in the field, an army of
-them, indeed; Herbert Bigelow, the radical preacher of Cincinnati, who
-had been president of the constitutional convention; Henry T. Hunt,
-Cincinnati’s young mayor; and, most influential of all of them perhaps,
-James M. Cox, destined that autumn to be elected governor of Ohio.
-And, besides all these, there was the spirit of the times, penetrating
-at last with its inspiring ideas even the conservatism of the country
-people. I was confident that the old man could be counted upon to vote
-for the initiative and referendum at any rate, since one so free and
-democratic in costume and manner must be of the democratic spirit
-as well, though I had my doubts of him in that moment when he should
-put on his spectacles and examine the amendments abolishing capital
-punishment, and granting home rule to cities.
-
-But the sun came out again as we climbed the hills that overlook
-Mansfield, to command a lovely scene, broad fertile valleys all renewed
-by the rain and flooded with sunshine, and I remembered that Altgeld
-had once lived there, and beheld this same landscape, that he had
-taught school in that town and from there had gone away with a regiment
-to fight in the Civil War. The chauffeur got out and took the chains
-off the tires, while we sat silent under the influences of the beauty
-of those little Ohio hills. And then, as we started on, the clouds
-returned, the scene darkened, and it began to rain again, and, before
-we knew, the car skidded and we were in the ditch. The wife of the
-farmer whose garden fence we had broken in our accident revealed all
-the old rural dislike of the urbanite; she said she was glad of our
-fate, since motorists were forever racing by and killing her chickens,
-and with this difficulty I left Ashley to deal, since he had been
-president of a railroad and was experienced in adjusting claims, and,
-after he had parleyed a while, I saw him take out his pocketbook, and
-then the chauffeur got the car out of the ditch and we were on our way
-again.
-
-The scenes and the experiences of that journey remain with me in a
-distinctness that is keen in my senses still; because I suppose I felt
-that in the race with time we were then engaged upon, if we were to
-reach Columbus that evening for the meeting which was to close the
-campaign, I was in a symbolic manner racing with my own fate; that
-campaign a success and I should be free. I should have liked to linger
-a while in Delaware, where I had spent a portion of my boyhood when my
-father was a pastor there, and where in the University my uncle William
-F. Whitlock had been a professor of Latin and literature for half a
-century, dean of the faculty, and, for a while, president. As we passed
-by the chapel in the shade of the old elms on the campus I felt that I
-could still hear the solemn strains of the noble hymn they sang at his
-funeral, the lusty young voices of a thousand students, united with
-the quivering trebles of some old clergymen, in “Faith of Our Fathers,
-Living Still.”
-
-My eyes could pierce the walls of the chapel, closed and silent that
-afternoon for the autumn term had not opened, and I could see myself
-sitting there in the pew with our family, and looking at the portrait
-in oil of my uncle on the wall, among the portraits of the other
-presidents of the University, faintly adumbrating on his great smoothly
-shaven face the smile of quizzical humor which he wears in my memory. I
-sat there,
-
-  by these tears a little boy again,
-
-and thought of those days so long before when at evening he would
-come to our house and stand spreading his hands before the fire for a
-while; he generally brought under his arm a book for my father to read.
-I remembered that he used to carry papers in his high hat, and that
-his coat stood away from his neck, round which he wore a low standing
-collar, with a black cravat. He seemed to carry in the pocket of his
-waistcoat an endless succession of eyeglasses; he would use a pair,
-take them down from his high nose, lay them on the table, forget them,
-and, when he wished to read again, draw another pair from his waistcoat
-pocket. And I went on thinking of him as he looked over his glasses on
-that evening when I had gone late into his study and found him bent
-over his desk with the “Satires” of Juvenal before him, studying his
-lesson for the morrow, he said. I thought he knew all the Latin there
-was left in this world, but, “Oh, no,” he said, and added: “If you
-would sometimes study at this hour of the night perhaps----” He did
-not finish his sentence, since it finished itself.... “I don’t exactly
-know how to render that passage, Professor,” a student, blundering
-through an unmastered lesson, said in conciliatory accents one morning.
-“Ah, that has been evident for some time,” my uncle replied.... And
-now there he lay in his coffin, on the spot in that dim chapel where
-he had so often stood up to address the students; he was gone with all
-those others whose portraits hung on the wall, men who had stood to
-me in my boyhood as the great figures of the world. I should see him
-walking under those trees no more, his tall form stooped in habitual
-meditation.... They were all big, those Whitlock forbears of mine,
-six feet tall every one of them, grim Puritans, I think, when they
-first came to this country three centuries ago.... And I had a vision
-of my uncle as walking that afternoon in other groves with all these
-dark ministerial figures that towered over my boyhood. They were all
-Puritans, too, strong and rugged men, inflexible, obdurate, much
-enduring, stern pioneers whose like is known no more. And I, who could
-join in the lofty strains of that old hymn, as a memorial to my uncle,
-could find unavailing regret in my reverence.... But all changes,
-and it was a time of change, one of those periods which make up the
-whelming tragedy of this life. And, as they had gone, so all the old
-combinations had disappeared with them, resolved into the elements that
-make up that shadowy vale we call the past.... But we were driving
-on, racing away from that past as fast as we could go, on by the
-cemetery where my uncle lies in his grave, on by the rocky ledges of
-the Olentangy, the little stream where we boys used to swim, and, just
-as darkness was falling, besmattered with mud, we drove into Columbus,
-and along High Street, hideous in the crazy decorations that were hung
-out in honor of the State Fair, and up to the Neil House--and across
-the street on the steps of the old state house four or five thousand
-people already gathered for the meeting at which I was to be the only
-speaker. A bath and a bite of supper, and then across the street to the
-meeting, and I was standing there before that vast crowd, and over us
-the shadowy mass of the old capitol, in which my grandfather had made
-the first motion that was ever put in it as a member of the senate half
-a century before; he told me that his two sons danced all night at the
-ball with which its opening was celebrated....
-
-And so, on that brilliant Sunday morning in September, as we entered
-the motor car in Columbus, with the impressions of the great meeting
-of that Saturday night still fresh and vivid in the mind, I could
-settle myself for the long drive back to Toledo over the white pikes
-that wound northward between the fair fields of our beautiful Ohio,
-and say to myself, over and over, with the delicious sensations of a
-secret, that the relief had almost come at last, and that now I could
-do the thing I loved to do--if only the people would approve the
-constitutional amendments at the election on Tuesday. There were the
-happiest of auguries in the sky; it was without a cloud to fleck its
-blue expanse, and the sun blazed and its light sparkled in the fresh
-air, and as we rode the fields swept by, the pastures still green, the
-ripening corn tall in maturity, nodding its heavy tassels and waving
-its broad leaves of dark green, the mown fields yellow with their
-stubble, and the wide land, somnolent and heavy with fecundity, already
-rich with the gold of autumn.
-
-And the people did approve, with vast majorities, and among all the
-principles of democracy they wrote in their fundamental law that day
-was that of municipal home rule, so that all those cities, undreamed of
-when the old constitution had been written, and all those little towns,
-silent and sleepy in the drowse of that Sunday afternoon, might own and
-operate their public utilities, might draft their own charters, have
-what form of government they pleased, in short, become free. And so
-the great dream of Johnson and of Jones came true at last.
-
-
-
-
-LXIII
-
-
-It was of the Free City they had dreamed and that they had not lived
-to behold the fulfillment of their dream was, in its way, the final
-certification of the validity of their services as pioneers. It is an
-old rule of life, or an old trick of the fates that seem so casually
-to govern life, that the dreams of mortals are seldom destined to
-come true, though mortals sometimes thwart the fates by finding their
-dreams in themselves sufficient. In this sense Jones and Johnson had
-already been rewarded. It had been a dream of wonder and of beauty,
-the vision of a city stately with towers, above which there hung the
-glow which poor Jude used to see at evening when he climbed to the
-roof of the Brown House on the ridgeway near Marygreen. It was a city
-in which there were the living conceptions of justice, pity, mercy,
-consideration, toleration, beauty, art, all those graces which mankind
-so long has held noblest and most dear. It was a city wherein human
-life was precious, and therefore gracious, a city which the citizen
-loved as a graduate loves his alma mater, a city with a communal
-spirit. There the old ideas of privilege had given way to the ideals of
-service, public property was held as sacred as private property, power
-was lightly wielded, the people’s voice was intelligent and omnipotent,
-for they had learned the wisdom that confuses demagogues, and amid the
-interplay of myriad forces, the democratic spirit was ever at work,
-performing its noble functions. You might have said that the people
-were inspired, since they united so readily in great constructive work,
-reducing to order and scientific arrangement all the manifold needs and
-expressions of the daily life, conquering in the old struggle against
-nature, providing against all that casualty and accident which make
-life to-day such a snarl of squalid tragedies and ridiculous comedies
-that it well may seem to be ruled by none other than the most whimsical
-and spiteful of irresponsible spirits. It was more than a city indeed,
-it was a realm of reason, wherein the people at last in good will
-were living a social life. The eternal negative, the everlasting no,
-had given way to a new affirmation; each morning should ordain new
-emancipations, and each evening behold new reconciliations among men.
-It was a city wherein the people were achieving more and more of
-leisure, that life in all her splendor and her beauty and her glory
-might not pass by unhailed, unrecognized even, by so many toiling
-thousands. It was the vision of a city set upon a hill, with happy
-people singing in the streets.
-
-These words I know but vaguely express the vision that had come to
-those two men with the unpoetic names of Johnson and Jones. When I
-speak of a city where people sing in the streets I am perfectly well
-aware of the smile that touches the lips of sophistication, though the
-smile would have been none the less cynical had I mentioned merely
-a city in which there were happy people at all. I am perfectly well
-aware that such a thing in all literalness is perhaps impossible to the
-weary, preoccupied crowds in the streets of any of our cities; it would
-be too absurd, too ridiculous, and probably against the law, if not
-indeed quite wicked. In Mr. Housman’s somber lines:
-
-  These are not in plight to bear,
-  If they would, another’s care.
-  They have enough as ’tis: I see
-  In many an eye that measures me
-  The mortal sickness of a mind
-  Too unhappy to be kind.
-  Undone with misery, all they can
-  Is to hate their fellow man;
-  And till they drop they needs must still
-  Look at you and wish you ill.
-
-And yet, it is not wholly impossible after all. One evening in
-Brussels, hearing the strains of a band I looked out of my hotel
-window, and saw a throng of youth and maidens dancing in a mist of rain
-down an asphalt pavement that glistened under the electric lights. It
-was a sight of such innocence, of such simple joy and gayety as one
-could never behold in our cities, and it occasioned no more remark,
-was considered no more out of place or unbecoming than it would be for
-a man to sprawl on one of our sidewalks and look for a dime he had
-dropped. But I happened to use that phrase about singing in the streets
-simply because it was one Jones used to employ, just as Johnson used
-forever to be talking about his city set on a hill. If Johnson’s phrase
-was in an old poetic strain Jones meant literally what he said. He used
-to talk of the crowds he had seen along the boulevards of Paris, and
-the gayety, impossible to us, in which they had celebrated the 14th of
-July, and he talked of all this to such purpose that Toledo became the
-first city in America to have a “sane” Fourth of July.
-
-Jones and Johnson, because they had vision, were thinking in sequences
-far beyond the material conceptions of the communities about them, and
-utterly impossible to skulking city politicians, with their miserable
-little treacheries and contemptible and selfish ambitions. They were
-imagining a spirit which might and perhaps some day will possess a
-whole people. And when I intimated the pity it was that they had not
-lived to see that silvery September day when the people of Ohio voted
-for municipal autonomy, I did not mean in the least to aver that their
-dream had been realized for us, simply because we had secured an
-amendment to our fundamental law. Memoranda to this effect had been
-noted on the roll of the constitution, but these after all were but the
-cold, formal and unlovely terms that expressed concepts which had been
-evolving slowly in the public consciousness.
-
-They realized, what all intelligent men must ere long apprehend, that
-too great stress has been laid on mere political activity. We have
-counted it as of controlling force in human affairs, the energy behind
-human activities, the cause, instead of the effect, the motive,
-instead of a mere expression of our complex life. They saw more deeply
-than politics, they recognized other and mightier influences at work,
-affecting the interests and the emotions of men. They knew that there
-is after all, an unconscious, subtle wisdom in the general neglect of
-politics by the masses of citizens, who intuitively know that other
-things are of more importance. They were but seeking to clear the way
-for the more fundamental expressions of human interest, human emotions,
-human fervors, human liberties. For of course it is not the city that
-makes the people free, but the people that make the city free; and
-the city cannot be free until the people have been freed from all
-their various bondages, free above all from themselves, from their own
-ignorances, littlenesses, superstitions, jealousies, envies, suspicions
-and fears. And it is not laws that can set them free, nor political
-parties, nor organizations, nor commissions, nor any sort of legalistic
-machinery. They must themselves set themselves free, and themselves
-indeed find out the way.
-
-Nor is that freedom to be defined; its chief value lies, as does
-that of any concept of truth, in the fact that it is largely
-impressionistic, subject to the alterations and corrections of that
-mysterious system of incessant change which is life itself. The value
-and even the permanence of many ideals and many truths--for truths
-are not always permanent, but are subject to the flux of life--lie in
-the fact that they are impressionistic. Reduced to formal lines and
-hardened into rigid detail they become something quite otherwise than
-that which they were at first or were intended to be.
-
-No, neither for them, nor for us, had the dream come true. But it had
-come nearer. It had become possible. Many obstacles had been removed;
-many purifications had been wrought, many deliverances achieved. To
-Cleveland and to Toledo, those two cities by the lake, the years
-had brought their changes. Not objectively, perhaps; outwardly they
-were much the same--without form, inharmonious, ugly, with the awful
-antitheses of our economic system, and what is worse, the vast welter
-of mediocrity and banality between. But there had been ameliorations.
-In each of them there were plans traced for beautiful civic centers
-with groups of buildings and other public amenities, which, when
-realized, would render them comparable in that respect to those old
-cities of Europe where the benison of art has descended on the people
-from the hands of kings. And these things were coming up out of the
-people, despite provincialism and philistinism and politics; there
-was a new understanding of sovereignty, not as a menace descending
-from above, but as an aspiration coming up from below. And this new
-aspiration in the people, pressing with the irresistible urge of
-moral sentiment against old institutions will renovate the cities and
-recreate the lives in them.
-
-For after all the world grows better. Not as rapidly as we should
-like, but yet, in a way, better. The immense sophistication of the
-modern mood, to be sure, is apt to cast contemporary thought in the
-mould of multifold negation; and sensibilities, long distressed by the
-contemplation of life in aspects it would not wear were this more of a
-realm of reason, find their only solace in that pessimism which makes
-charming so much of modern poetry. Doubtless this is the mood most
-congenial to the agnosticism of the reflective, contemplative mind in
-the present phase of its philosophy. It has its undoubted fascinations,
-its uses, and, indeed, its truth, part reaction though it be from
-the excessive strain of contemporary life in cities, and the dull
-orthodoxies of the Victorian age. To one, indeed, who, in eight years’
-participation in municipal politics might in that respect have been
-compared to that character in one of Anatole France’s novels who never
-opened a door without coming upon some hitherto unsuspected depth of
-infamy in mankind, it was difficult to avoid that strain. And yet, bad
-as municipal government has been in this land, it is everywhere better
-to-day. The level of moral sentiment, like the level of intelligence,
-mounts slowly, in wide spirals, but it mounts steadily all the time. In
-not every city has the advance been so marked, for not every city has
-had such personalities as Johnson and Jones, and without personalities,
-democracies seem unable to function. The old corruptions, once so
-flagrant, are growing less and less, and there is left only the
-residuum of meanness and pettiness and spite, the crimes that require
-no courage and entail no fear of the law, committed by beings who
-never could attain the robust stature of the old and brazen and robust
-offenders. The strain is running out, attenuating, and ere long will
-be extinct.
-
-Those gentle pessimists of such congenial culture may indeed point
-to other ages that excel ours, say in speculative thought, and all
-the five arts, but I think it is demonstrable that upon the whole,
-and employing long epochs for the comparison, things are growing
-better. Notwithstanding all the ignorance and all the woe in the world
-to-night, never before has there been such widespread opportunity for
-enlightenment, never such widespread comfort, never so much kindness,
-so much pity for animals, for children, and, above all, never have
-women been shown such consideration. It needs no very powerful
-imagination, peering into the shadowy background of human history,
-to appreciate the tremendous implications of this fact. Indeed the
-great feminist movement of our time, a movement which in the histories
-of mankind centuries hence will be given the sectional mark of the
-beginning of a new age, is in itself the proof of a great advance, in
-which the ballot will be the very least important of all the liberties
-to be won.
-
-With all the complications of this vast and confusing interplay of
-the forces of this age, the city is inextricably bound by its awful
-responsibility for so much that is bad, for so much that is good, in
-our time. And in the cities, now as always, the struggle for liberty
-will go on. The old leaders will pass, and the new will pass, and pass
-swiftly, for they are quickly consumed in the stress and heat of the
-passionate and savage struggle. To them must ever come the fatigue of
-long drawn opposition, of the repeated and unavailing assaults on the
-cold, solid and impregnable walls of institutions. In this fatigue they
-may grow conservative after a while, and they should pray to be spared
-the acquiescence of the middle years, the base capitulation of age.
-
-But always the people remain, pressing onward in a great stream up
-the slopes, and always somehow toward the light. For the great dream
-beckons, leads them on, the dream of social harmony always prefigured
-in human thought as the city. This radiant vision of the city is the
-oldest dream in the world. All literature is saturated with it. It
-has been the ideal of human achievement since the day when the men on
-the plains of Shinar sought to build a city whose towers should reach
-unto heaven. It was the angelic vision of the mystic on Patmos, the
-city descending out of heaven, and lying foursquare, the city where
-there was to be no more sorrow nor crying. It has been the goal of
-civilization down to this hour of the night, when, however vaguely and
-dimly, the ideal stirs the thousands in this feverish town going about
-their strange and various businesses, pleasures, devotions, sacrifices,
-sins. It has been the everlasting dream of humanity. And humanity will
-continue to struggle for it, to struggle toward it. And some day,
-somewhere, to the sons of men the dream will come true.
-
-
-THE END
-
-
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[A] These have been collected and published under the title, “Letters
-of Labor and Love,” by Samuel M. Jones, The Bobbs-Merrill Co.,
-Indianapolis.
-
-[B] “On the Enforcement of Law in Cities,” Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis,
-1913.
-
-[C] “The Truth About the White Slave Traffic,” by Teressa
-Billington-Greig. _The English Review_, June, 1913.
-
-
-
-
-TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
-
-
-Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
-
-Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
-
-Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
-
-Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.
-
-
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