CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

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

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

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

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

J. J. C.

ROKEBY, June 10, 1898.

I
POLITICS

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

The growth and concentration of capital which the railroad and the telegraph made possible is the salient fact in the history of the last quarter-century. That fact is at the bottom of our political troubles. It was inevitable that the enormous masses of wealth, springing out of new conditions and requiring new laws, should strive to control the4 legislation and the administration which touched them at every point. At the present time, we cannot say just what changes were or were not required by enlightened theory. It is enough to see that such changes as came were inevitable; and nothing can blind us to the fact that the methods by which they were obtained were subversive of free government.

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

At the very moment when the enthusiasm of the nation had been exhausted in a heroic war which left the Republican party-managers in possession of the ark of the covenant, the best intellect of the country was withdrawn from public affairs and devoted to trade. During the period of expansion which followed, the industrial forces called in the5 ablest men of the nation to aid them in getting control of the machinery of government. The name of king was never freighted with more power than the name of party in the United States; whatever was done in that name was right. It is the old story: there has never been a despotism which did not rest upon superstition. The same spirit that made the Republican name all powerful in the nation at large made the Democratic name valuable in Democratic districts.

The situation as it existed was made to the hand of trade. Political power had by the war been condensed and packed for delivery; and in the natural course of things the political trademarks began to find their way into the coffers of the capitalist. The change of motive power behind the party organizations—from principles, to money—was silently effected during the thirty years which followed the war. Like all organic change, it was unconscious. It was understood by no one. It is recorded only in a few names and phrases; as, for instance, that part of the organization which was purchased was called the “machine,” and the general manager of it became known as the “boss.” The external political history of the country continued as before. It is true that a steady6 degradation was to be seen in public life, a steady failure of character, a steady decline of decency. But questions continued to be discussed, and in form decided, on their merits, because it was in the interest of commerce that they should in form be so decided. Only quite recently has the control of money become complete; and there are reasons for believing that the climax is past.

Let us take a look at the change on a small scale. A railroad is to be run through a country town or small city, in New York or Pennsylvania. The railroad employs a local attorney, naturally the ablest attorney in the place. As time goes on, various permits for street uses are needed; and instead of relying solely upon popular demand, the attorney finds it easier to bribe the proper officials. All goes well: the railroad thrives, the town grows. But in the course of a year new permits of various kinds are needed. The town ordinances interfere with the road and require amendment. There is to be a town election; and it occurs to the railroad’s attorney that he might be in alliance with the town officers before they are elected. He goes to the managers of the party which is likely to7 win; for instance, the Republican party. Everything that the railroad wants is really called for by the economic needs of the town. The railroad wants only fair play and no factious obstruction. The attorney talks to the Republican leader, and has a chance to look over the list of candidates, and perhaps even to select some of them. The railroad makes the largest campaign subscription ever made in that part of the country. The Republican leader can now employ more workers to man the polls, and, if necessary, he can buy votes. He must also retain some fraction of the contribution for his own support, and distribute the rest in such manner as will best keep his “organization” together.

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

During the year, a very nice point of law arises as to the rights of the railroad to certain valuable land claimed by the town. The city attorney is an able man, and reasonable. In spite of his ability, he manages somehow to state the city’s case on an untenable ground. A decision follows in favor8 of the railroad. At the following election, the city attorney has become the Republican candidate for judge, and the railroad’s campaign subscription is trebled. In the conduct of railroads, even under the best management, accidents are common; and while it is true that important decisions are appealable, a trial judge has enormous powers which are practically discretionary. Meanwhile, there have arisen questions of local taxation of the railroad’s property, questions as to grade crossings, as to the lighting of cars, as to time schedules, and the like. The court calendars are becoming crowded with railroad business; and that business is now more than one attorney can attend to. In fact, the half dozen local lawyers of prominence are railroad men; the rest of the lawyers would like to be. Every one of the railroad lawyers receives deferential treatment, and, when possible, legal advantage in all of the public offices. The community is now in the control of a ring, held together by just one thing, the railroad company’s subscription to the campaign fund.

By this time a serious scandal has occurred in the town,—nothing less than the rumor of a deficit in the town treasurer’s accounts, and the citizens are concerned about it. One9 of the railroad’s lawyers, a strong party man, happens to be occupying the post of district attorney; for the yearly campaign subscriptions continue. This district attorney is, in fact, one of the committee on nominations who put the town treasurer into office; and the Republican party is responsible for both. No prosecution follows. The district attorney stands for re-election.

An outsider comes to live in the town. He wants to reform things, and proceeds to talk politics. He is not so inexperienced as to seek aid from the rich and respectable classes. He knows that the men who subscribed to the railroad’s stock are the same men who own the local bank, and that the manufacturers and other business men of the place rely on the bank for carrying on their business. He knows that all trades which are specially touched by the law, such as the liquor-dealers’ and hotel-keepers’, must “stand in” with the administration; so also must the small shopkeepers, and those who have to do with sidewalk privileges and town ordinances generally. The newcomer talks to the leading hardware merchant, a man of stainless reputation, who admits that the district attorney has been remiss; but the merchant is a Republican, and says that10 so long as he lives he will vote for the party that saved the country. To vote for a Democrat is a crime. The reformer next approaches the druggist (whose father-in-law is in the employ of the railroad), and receives the same reply. He goes to the florist. But the florist owns a piece of real estate, and has a theory that it is assessed too high. The time for revising the assessment rolls is coming near, and he has to see the authorities about that. The florist agrees that the town is a den of thieves; but he must live; he has no time to go into theoretical politics. The stranger next interviews a retired grocer. But the grocer has lent money to his nephew, who is in the coal business, and is getting special rates from the railroad, and is paying off the debt rapidly. The grocer would be willing to help, but his name must not be used.

It is needless to multiply instances of what every one knows. After canvassing the whole community, the stranger finds five persons who are willing to work to defeat the district attorney: a young doctor of good education and small practice, a young lawyer who thinks he can make use of the movement by betraying it, a retired anti-slavery preacher, a maiden lady, and a piano-tuner.11 The district attorney is re-elected by an overwhelming vote.

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

In the following year worse things happen. The town treasurer steals more money, and the district attorney is openly accused of sharing the profits. The Democrats are shouting for reform, and declare that they will run the strongest man in town for district attorney. He is a Democrat, but one who fought for the Union. He is no longer in active practice, and is, on the whole, the most distinguished citizen of the place. This suggestion is popular. The hardware merchant declares that he will vote the Democratic ticket, and there is a sensation. It appears that during all these years there has been a Democratic organization in the town, and that the notorious corruption of the Republicans makes a Democratic victory possible. The railroad company therefore goes to the manager of the Democratic party, and explains that it wants only to be let alone. It explains that it takes no interest in politics, but that, if a change is to come, it desires only that So-and-So shall be retained,12 and it leaves a subscription with the Democratic manager. In short, it makes the best terms it can. The Democratic leader, if he thinks that he can make a clean sweep, may nominate the distinguished citizen, together with a group of his own organization comrades. It obviously would be of no use to him to name a full citizens’ ticket. That would be treason to his party. If he takes this course and wins, we shall have ring rule of a slightly milder type. The course begins anew, under a Democratic name; and it may be several years before another malfeasance occurs.

But the Republican leader and the railroad company do not want war; they want peace. They may agree to make it worth while for the Democrats not to run the distinguished citizen. A few Democrats are let into the Republican ring. They are promised certain minor appointive offices, and some contracts and emoluments. Accordingly, the Democrats do not nominate the distinguished citizen. The hardware man sees little choice between the two nominees for district attorney; at any rate, he will not vote for a machine Democrat, and he again votes for his party nominee. All the reform talk simmers down to13 silence. The Republicans are returned to power.

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

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

It must not be imagined that any part of the general public clearly understands this situation. The state of mind of the Better Element of the Republican side has been seen. The good Democrats are equally distressed. The distinguished citizen ardently desires to oust the Republican ring. He14 subscribes year after year to the campaign fund of his own party, and declares that the defalcation of the town treasurer has given it the opportunity of a generation. The Democratic organization takes his money and accepts his moral support, and uses it to build up one end of the machine. It cries, “Reform! Reform! Give us back the principles of Jefferson and of Tilden!”

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

It may be remarked, in passing, that New York city reached the Happy Family stage many years ago. Tammany Hall is in power, being maintained there by the great mercantile interests. The Republican party is out of power, and its organization is kept going by the same interests. It has always been the ear-mark of an enterprise of the15 first financial magnitude in New York that it subscribed to both campaign funds. The Republican function has been to prevent any one from disturbing Tammany Hall. This has not been difficult; the Republicans have always been in a hopeless minority, and the machine managers have understood this perfectly. Now if, by the simple plan of denouncing Tammany Hall, and appealing to the war record of the Republican party, they could minimize the independent vote and hold their own constituency, Tammany would be safe. The matter is actually more complex than this, but the principle is obvious.

To return to our country town. It is easy to see that the railroad is pouring out its money in the systematic corruption of the entire community. Even the offices with which it has no contact will be affected by this corruption. Men put in office because they are tools will work as tools only. Voters once bribed will thereafter vote for money only. The subscribing and the voting classes, whose state of mind is outlined above, are not purely mercenary. The retired grocer, the florist, the druggist, are all influenced by mixed motives, in which personal interest bears a greater or a smaller share. Each of these men belongs to a party, as a Brahmin is born into a caste.16 His spirit must suffer an agony of conversion before he can get free, even if he is poor. If he has property, he must pay for that conversion by the loss of money, also.

Since 1865 the towns throughout the United States have been passing through this stage. A ring was likely to spring up wherever there was available capital. We hear a great talk about the failure of our institutions as applied to cities, as if it were our incapacity to deal with masses of people and with the problems of city expansion that wrecked us. It is nothing of the sort. There is intellect and business capacity enough in the country to run the Chinese Empire like clockwork. Philosophers state broadly that our people “prefer to live in towns,” and cite the rush to the cities during the last thirty years. The truth is that the exploitation of the continent could be done most conveniently by the assembling of business men in towns; and hence it is that the worst rings are found in the larger cities. But there are rings everywhere; and wherever you see one you will find a factory behind it. If the population had remained scattered, commerce would have pursued substantially the same course. We should have had the rings just the same. It is perfectly17 true that the wonderful and scientific concentration of business that we have seen in the past thirty years gave the chance for the wonderful and scientific concentration of its control over politics. The state machine could be constructed easily, by consolidating local rings of the same party name.

The boss par excellence is a state boss. He is a comparatively recent development. He could exist only in a society which had long been preparing for him. He could operate only in a society where almost every class and almost every individual was in a certain sense corrupted. The exact moment of his omnipotence in the State of New York, for instance, was recorded by the actions of the State legislature. Less than ten years ago, the bribing of the legislature was done piecemeal and at Albany; and the great corporations of the State were accustomed to keep separate attorneys in the capitol, ready for any emergency. But the economy of having the legislature corrupted before election soon became apparent. If the party organizations could furnish a man with whom the corporation managers could contract directly, they and their directors could sleep at night. The state boss sprang into existence to meet18 this need. He is a commercial agent, like his little local prototype; but the scope of his activities is so great and their directions are so various, the forces that he deals with are so complex and his mastery over them is so complete, that a kind of mystery envelops him. He appears in the newspapers like a demon of unaccountable power. He is the man who gives his attention to aiding in the election of the candidates for state office, and to retaining his hold upon them after election. His knowledge of local politics all over a State, and the handling of the very large sums of money subscribed by sundry promoters and corporations, explain the miracle of his control.

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

The effect of commercialism on politics is best seen in the state System. The manner of nominating candidates shows how easily19 the major force in a community makes use of its old customs.

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

The men who, in the course of a party convention, are doing this marching and countermarching, this forming and dissolving into committees and delegations, and who appear like acolytes going through mystical rites and ceremonies, are only self-seeking men, without a real political idea20 in their heads. Their evolutions are done to be seen by the masses of the people, who will give them party support if these forms are complied with.

We all know well another interesting perversion of function. A legislator is by political theory a wise, enlightened man, pledged to intellectual duties. He gives no bonds. He is responsible only under the Constitution and to his own conscience. Therefore, if the place is to be filled by a dummy, almost anybody will do. A town clerk must be a competent man, even under boss rule; but a legislator will serve the need so long as he is able to say “ay” and “no.” The boss, then, governs the largest and the most complex business enterprise in the State; and he is always a man of capacity. He is obliged to conduct it in a cumbersome and antiquated manner, and to proceed at every step according to precedent and by a series of fictions. When we consider that the legislators and governors are, after all, not absolute dummies; that among them are ambitious and rapacious men, with here and there an enemy or a traitor to the boss and to his patrons, we see that the boss must be well equipped with the intellect of intrigue. And remember this: he must keep both21 himself and his patrons out of jail, and so far as possible keep them clear of public reprobation.

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

Turning now to New York city, we find the political situation very similar to that of the country town already described. The interests which actually control the businesses of the city are managed by very few individuals. It is only that the sums involved are different. One of these men is president of an insurance company whose assets are $130,000,000; another is president of a system of street railways with a capital stock of $30,000,000; another is president of an elevated road system with a capital of the same amount; a fourth is vice-president of a paving company worth $10,000,000; a fifth owns $50,000,000 worth of real estate; a sixth controls a great railroad system; a seventh is president of a savings-bank in which $5,000,000 are deposited; and so on. The commercial ties which bind the community together are as close in the city as in the22 country town. The great magnates live in palaces, and the lesser ones in palaces, also. The hardware-dealer of the small town is in New York the owner of iron-works, a man of stainless reputation. The florist is the owner of a large tract of land within the city limits, through which a boulevard is about to be cut. The retired merchant has become a partner of his nephew, and is developing one of the suburbs by means of an extension of an electric road system. But the commercial hierarchy does not stop here; it continues radiating, spreading downward. All businesses are united by the instruments and usages which the genius of trade has devised. All these interests together represent the railroad of the country town. They take no real interest in politics, and they desire only to be let alone.

For the twenty years before the Strong administration the government of the city was almost continuously under the control of a ring, or, accurately speaking, of a Happy Family. Special circumstances made this ring well nigh indestructible. The Boss-out-of-Power of the Happy Family happens to be also the boss of the State legislature. He performs a double function. This is what has given Platt his extraordinary power.23 It will have been noticed that some of the masses of wealth above mentioned are peculiarly subject to State legislation: they subscribe directly to the State boss’s fund. Some are subject to interference from the city administration: they subscribe to the city boss’s fund.

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

As to the Tammany branch of the concern, the big money interests need specific and often illegal advantages, and pay heavily over the Tammany counter. But as we saw before, public officers, if once corrupted, will work only for money. Every business that has to do with one or another of the city offices must therefore now contribute for “protection.” A foreign business that is started in this city subscribes to Tammany Hall as a visitor writes his name in24 a book at a watering-place. It gives him the run of the town. In the same way, the State-fearing business man subscribes to Platt for “protection.” No secret is made of these conditions. The business man regards the reformer as a monomaniac who is not reasonable enough to see the necessity for his tribute. In the conduct of any large business, this form of bribery is as regular an item as rent. The machinery for such bribery is perfected. It is only when some blundering attempt is made by a corporation to do the bribing itself, when some unbusinesslike attempt is made to get rid of the middleman, that the matter is discovered. A few boodle aldermen go to jail, and every one is scandalized. The city and county officers of the new city of New York will have to do with the disbursing of $70,000,000 annually,—fully one half of it in the conduct of administration. The power of these officers to affect or even control values, by manipulation of one sort or another, is familiar to us all from experience in the past.

So much for business. Let us look at the law. The most lucrative practice is that of an attorney who protects great corporate interests among these breakers. He needs25 but one client; he gets hundreds. The mind of the average lawyer makes the same unconscious allowance for bribery as that of the business man. Moreover, we cannot overlook the cases of simple old-fashioned bribery to which the masses of capital give rise. In a political emergency any amount of money is forthcoming immediately, and it is given from aggregations of capital so large that the items are easily concealed in the accounts. Bribery, in one form or another, is part of the unwritten law. It is atmospheric; it is felt by no one. The most able men in the community believe that society would drop to pieces without bribery. They do not express it in this way, but they act upon the principle in an emergency. A leader of the bar, at the behest of his Wall Street clients, begs the reform police board not to remove Inspector Byrnes, who is the Jonathan Wild of the period. The bench is fairly able. But many of the judges on the bench have paid large campaign assessments in return for their nominations; others have given notes to the bosses. This reveals the exact condition of things. In a corrupt era the judges pay cash. Now they help their friends. The son or the son-in-law of a judge is sure of a good practice, and referees26 are appointed from lists which are largely dictated by the professional politicians of both parties.

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

So far as human suffering goes, the positive evils of the system fall largely on the poor. The rich buy immunity, but the poor are persecuted, and have no escape. This has always been the case under a tyranny. What else could we expect in New York? The Lexow investigation showed us the condition of the police force. The lower courts, both criminal and civil, and the police department were used for vote-getting and for money-getting purposes. They were serving as instruments of extortion and of favoritism. But in the old police courts the27 foreigner and the honest poor were actually attacked. Process was issued against them, their business was destroyed, and they were jailed unless they could buy off. This system still exists to some extent in the lower civil courts.

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

Let us now see how those standards came to exist. Imagine a community in which, for more than a generation, the government has been completely under boss rule, so that the system has become part of the habits and of the thought of the people, and consider what views we might expect to find in the hearts of the citizens of such a community. The masses will have been controlled by what is really bribery and terrorism, but what appears in the form of a very plausible28 appeal to the individual on the ground of self-interest. For forty years money and place have been corrupting them. Their whole conception of politics is that it is a matter of money and of place. The well-to-do will have been apt to prosper in proportion as they have made themselves serviceable to the dominant powers, and have become part and parcel of the machinery of the system. It is not to be pretended that every man in such a community is a rascal, but it is true that in so far as his business brings him into contact with the administrative officers every man will be put to the choice between lucrative malpractice and thankless honesty. A conviction will spread throughout the community that nothing can be done without a friend at court; that honesty does not pay, and probably never has paid in the history of the world; that a boss is part of the mechanism by which God governs mankind; that property would not be safe without him; and, finally, that the recognized bosses are not so bad as they are painted. The great masses of corporate property have owners who really believe that the system of government which enabled them to make money is the only safe government. These people cling to abuses as to a life-preserver. They29 fear that an honest police board will not be able to bribe the thieves not to steal from them, that an honest State insurance department will not be able to prevent the legislature from pillaging them. It is absolutely certain that in the first struggles for reform the weight of the mercantile classes will be thrown very largely on the side of conservatism.

Now, in a great city like New York the mercantile bourgeoisie will include almost every one who has an income of five thousand dollars a year, or more. These men can be touched by the bosses, and therefore, after forty years of tyranny, it is not to be expected that many of those who wear black coats will have much enthusiasm for reform. It is “impracticable;” it is “discredited;” it is “expensive;” it is “advocated by unknown men;” it speaks ill of the “respectable;” it “does harm” by exciting the poor against the rich; it is “unbusinesslike” and “visionary;” it is “self-righteous.” We have accordingly had, in New York city, a low and perverted moral tone, an incapacity to think clearly or to tell the truth when we know it. This is both the cause and the consequence of bondage. A generation of men really believe that honesty is bad policy,30 and continue to be governed by Tammany Hall.

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

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

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

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

In an enterprise whose sole aim is to raise the moral standard, idealism always pays. A reverse following a fight for principle, like the defeat of Low, is pure gain. It records32 the exact state of the cause. It educates the masses on a gigantic scale. The results of that education are immediately visible.

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

That weakness of intellect which makes reformers love quick returns is twin brother to a certain defect of character. Personal vanity is very natural in men who figure as tribunes of the people. They say, “Look at Abraham Lincoln, and how he led the people out of the wilderness; let us go no faster than the people in pushing these reforms; let us accept half-measures; let us be Abraham Lincoln.” The example of Lincoln has33 wrecked many a promising young man; for really Lincoln has no more to do with the case than Julius Cæsar. As soon as the reformers give up trying to be statesmen, and perceive that their own function is purely educational, and that they are mere anti-slavery agitators and persons of no account whatever, they will succeed better.

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

In New York, the problem is not to oust Tammany Hall; another would arise in a year. It is to make the great public understand the boss system, of which Tammany is only a part. As fast as the reformers see that clearly themselves, they will find the right machinery to do the work in hand. It may be that, like the Jews, we shall have to spend forty years more in the wilderness, until the entire generation that lived under Pharaoh has perished. But education nowadays marches quickly. The progress that has been made during the last seven years in the city of New York gives hope that34 within a decade a majority of the voters will understand clearly that all the bosses are in league.

In 1890, this fact was so little understood by the managers of an anti-Tammany movement which sprang up in that year that, after raising a certain stir and outcry, they put in the field a ticket made up exclusively of political hacks, whose election would have left matters exactly where they stood. The people at large, led by the soundest political instinct, re-elected Tammany Hall, and gave to sham reform the rebuff it deserved. In 1894, after the Lexow investigation had kept the town at fever-heat of indignation all summer, Mayor Strong was nominated by the Committee of Seventy, under an arrangement with Platt. The excitement was so great that the people at large did not examine Mr. Strong’s credentials. He was a Republican merchant, and in no way identified with the boss system. Mayor Strong’s administration has been a distinct advance, in many ways encouraging. Its errors and weaknesses have been so clearly traceable to the system which helped elect him that it has been in the highest degree valuable as an object-lesson. In 1895, only one year after Mayor Strong’s election, the fruits of35 his administration could not yet be seen. In that year a few judges and minor local officers were to be chosen. By this time the “citizens’ movement” had become a regular part of a municipal election. A group of radicals, the legatees of the Strong campaign, had for a year been enrolled in clubs called Good Government Clubs. These men took the novel course of nominating a complete ticket of their own. This was considered a dangerous move by the moderate reformers, who were headed by the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce and its well-meaning supporters then took a step which, from an educational standpoint, turned out to be most important. In their terror lest Tammany Hall should gain the prestige of a by-election, they made an arrangement with Platt, and were allowed to name some candidates on his ticket. This was the famous “fusion,” which the Good Government men attacked with as much energy as they might have expended on Tammany Hall. A furious campaign of crimination between the two reform factions followed, and of course Tammany was elected.

The difference between the Good Government men (the Goo-Goos, as they were36 called) and the Fusionists was entirely one of political education. The Goo-Goo mind had advanced to the point of seeing that Platt was a confederate of Tammany and represented one wing of the great machine. To give him money was useless; to lend him respectability was infamous. These ideas were disseminated by the press; and it was immaterial that they were disseminated in the form of denunciations of the Good Government Clubs. The people at large began to comprehend clearly what they had always instinctively believed. There was now a nucleus of men in the town who preferred Tammany Hall to any victory that would discredit reform.

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

Much surprise has been expressed that37 there should be 100,000 Republicans in New York whose loyalty to the party made them vote a straight ticket with the certainty of electing Tammany Hall; but in truth, when we consider the history of the city, we ought rather to be surprised at the great size of the vote for Mr. Low. He was the man who arranged the fusion of 1895. It was entirely due to a lack of clear thinking and of political courage that such an arrangement was then made. Two years ago the Chamber of Commerce did not clearly understand the evils that it was fighting. Is it a wonder that 100,000 individual voters are still backward in their education? If we discount the appeal of self-interest, which determined many of them, there are probably some 75,000 Republicans whose misguided party loyalty obscured their view and deadened their feelings. They cannot be said to hate bad government very much. They do not think Tammany Hall so very bad, after all. As the London papers said, the dog has returned to his vomit. It is unintelligent to abuse them. They are the children of the age. A few years ago we were all such as they. Of Mr. Low’s 150,000 supporters, on the other hand, there are probably at least 40,000 who would vote through thick38 and thin for the principles which his campaign stood for.

Any one who is a little removed by time or by distance from New York knows that the city cannot have permanent good government until a clear majority of our 500,000 voters shall develop what the economists call an “effective desire” for it. It is not enough merely to want reform. The majority must know how to get it. For educational purposes, the intelligent discussion throughout the recent campaign is worth all the effort that it cost. The Low campaign was notable in another particular. The banking and the mercantile classes subscribed liberally to the citizens’ campaign fund. They are the men who have had the most accurate knowledge of the boss system, because they support it. At last they have dared to expose it. Indeed, there was a rent in Wall Street. The great capitalists and the promoters backed Tammany and Platt, as a matter of course; but many individuals of power and importance in the street came out strongly for Low. They acted at personal risk, with courage, out of conscience. The great pendulum of wealth has swung toward decency. It is very difficult to use this or any money in the cause of reform39 without doing more harm than good. But the money is not the main point; the personal influence of the men who give it operates more powerfully than the money. Hereafter reform will be respectable. The professional classes are pouring into it. The young men are re-entering politics. Its victory is absolutely certain, and will not be distant.

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

One effect of the commercial supremacy has been to make social life intolerably dull, by dividing people into cliques and trade unions. The millionaire dines with the millionaire, the artist with the artist, the40 hat-maker with the hat-maker, gentlefolk with gentlefolk. All of these sets are equally uninspiring, equally frightened at a strange face. The hierarchy of commerce is dull. The intelligent people in America are dull, because they have no contact, no social experience. Their intelligence is a clique and wears a badge. They think they are not affected by the commercialism of the times; but their attitude of mind is precisely that of a lettered class living under a tyranny. They flock by themselves. It is certain that the cure for class feeling is public activity. The young jeweller, the young printer, and the golf-player, each, after a campaign in which they have been fighting for a principle, finds that social enjoyment lies in working with people unlike himself, for a common object. Reform movements bring men into touch, into struggle with the powers that are really shaping our destinies, and show them the sinews and bones of the social organism. The absurd social prejudices which unman the rich and the poor alike vanish in a six weeks’ campaign. Indeed, the exhilaration of real life is too much for many of the reformers. Even bankers neglect their business, and dare not meet their partners, and41 a dim thought crosses their minds that perhaps the most enlightened way to spend money is, not to make it, but to invest their energies directly in life.

The reasons for believing that the boss system has reached its climax are manifold. Some of them have been stated, others may be noted. In the first place, the railroads are built. Business is growing more settled. The sacking of the country’s natural resources goes on at a slower pace. It is a matter of history, that economic laws did so operate, that the New York Central Railroad controlled the State legislature during the period of the building and consolidation of the many small roads which make up the present great system. But the conditions have changed. Bribery, like any other crime, may be explained by an emergency; but everyone believes that bribery is not a permanent necessity in the running of a railroad, and this general belief will determine the practices of the future. Public opinion will not stand the abuses; and without the abuse where is the profit? In many places, the old system of bribery is still being continued out of habit, and at a loss. The corporations can get what they42 want more cheaply by legal methods, and they are discovering this. In the second place, the boss system is now very generally understood. The people are no longer deceived. The ratio between party feeling and self-interest is changing rapidly, in the mind of the average man. It was the mania of party feeling that supported the boss system and rendered political progress impossible, and party feeling is dying out. We have seen, for instance, that those men who, by the accident of the war, were shaken in their party loyalty, have been the most politically intelligent class in the nation. The Northern Democrats, who sided with their opponents to save the Union, were the first men to be weaned of party prejudice, and from their ranks, accordingly, came civil service reformers, tariff reformers, etc.

It is noteworthy, also, that the Jewish mind is active in all reform movements. The isolation of the race has saved it from party blindness, and has given scope to its extraordinary intelligence. The Hebrew prophet first put his finger on blackmail, as the curse of the world, and boldly laid the charge at the door of those who profited by the abuse. It was the Jew who perceived43 that, in the nature of things, the rich and the powerful in a community will be trammelled up and identified with the evils of the times. The wrath of the Hebrew prophets and the arraignments of the New Testament owe part of their eternal power to their recognition of that fact. They record an economic law.

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

The voter will see that it is wrong to support the subsidized boss, just as the capitalist has already begun to recoil from the monster which he created. He sees that it is wrong at the very moment when he is44 beginning to find it unprofitable. The old trademark has lost its value.

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

The question of boss rule is of national importance. The future of the country is at stake. Until this question is settled, all others are in abeyance. The fight against money is a fight for permission to decide questions on their merits. The last presidential election furnished an illustration of this. At a private meeting of capitalists held in New York City, to raise money for the McKinley campaign, a very important man fervidly declared that he had already subscribed $5000 to “buy Indiana,” and that if called on to do so he would subscribe $5000 more! He was greeted with cheers for his patriotism. Many of our best citizens believe not only that money bought45 that election, but that the money was well spent, because it averted a panic. These men do not believe in republican institutions; they have found something better.

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

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

But the election is memorable. It is a sign of the times. The grip of commerce46 is growing weaker, the voice of conscience louder. A phase in our history is passing away. That phase was predestined from the beginning.

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

The corruption that we used to denounce so fiercely and understand so little was a phase of the morality of an era which is already vanishing. It was as natural as the virtue which is replacing it; it will be a curiosity almost before we have done studying it. We see that our institutions were particularly susceptible to this disease of commercialism, and that the sickness was acute, but that it was not mortal. Our institutions survived.47

II
SOCIETY

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

Let us imagine that some State like Pennsylvania, on which the boss system had been so firmly fixed that a boss was able to bequeath his seat in the United States Senate to his son, had shown forth an ambitious man, a ruler who realized that his function was not one of business, but one of government; let us imagine that a President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, some man of great capacity, had undertaken to rule the State. He would, by his position as State boss, have been able gradually to do away with the petty bosses and petty abuses. He would give the State a general cities law, good schools, clean streets, speedy justice;50 every necessary municipal improvement. Gas, water, boulevards would be supplied with an economy positively startling to a generation accustomed to jobs. He would destroy the middlemen as Louis XI. destroyed the nobles, and give to his State, for the first time in the history of the country, good government. A benign tyranny, with every department in the hands of experts, makes the strongest form of government in the world. Every class is satisfied. Pennsylvania would have been famous the world over. Its inhabitants would have been proud of it; foreigners would have written books about it; other States would have imitated it.

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

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

Our feeble and floundering citizens’ movements in New York during the last ten51 years show us how hard it is to recover the power of self-government when once lost; how gradual the gain, even under the most stimulating conditions of misrule. Given thirty years of able administration by a single man, and the boss system would have sunk so deep into the popular mind, the arctic crust of prejudice and incompetence would have frozen so deep, that it might easily take two hundred years for the community to come to life. Recovery could only come through the creeping in of abuses, through the decentralization of the great tyranny. And as each abuse arose, the population would clamor to the dictator and beg him to correct it. After a while a few thinkers would arise who would see that the only way to revive our institutions was by the painstaking education of the people. The stock in trade of these teachers would be the practical abuses, and very often they would be obliged to urge upon the people a course which would make the abuses temporarily more acute.

We have escaped an age of tyrants, because the eyes of the bosses and their masters were fixed on money. They were not ambitious. Government was an annex to trade. To certain people the boss appears52 as a ruler of men. If proof were needed that he is a hired man employed to do the dirty work of others, what better proof could we have than this: No one of all the hundreds of bosses thrown up during the last thirty years has ever lifted himself out of his sphere, or even essayed to rule.

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

For the sake of analysis it is convenient now to separate and again not to separate the influences of business proper from the influences of dishonesty, but in real life they are one thing. Dishonesty is a mere result of excessive devotion to money-making. The general and somewhat indefinite body of rules which are considered “honest” change from time to time. I call a thing dishonest when it offends my instinct. The next man may call it honest. The question is settled by society at large. “What can a man do and remain in his club?” That gives the practical standards of a community. The devotion of the individual to his bank account gives the reason why the financier and his agent, the boss, could always find53 councilmen, legislators, judges, lawyers, to be their jackals, or to put the equation with the other end first, it is the reason why the legislators could always combine to blackmail the capitalist: this political corruption is a mere spur and offshoot of our business corruption. We know more about it, because politics cannot be carried on wholly in the dark. Business can. The main facts are known. Companies organize subsidiary companies to which they vote the money of the larger company—cheating their stockholders. The railroad men get up small roads and sell them to the great roads which they control—cheating their stockholders. The purchasing agents of many great enterprises cheat the companies as a matter of course, not by a recognized system of commissions—like French cooks—but by stealth. So in trade, you cannot sell goods to the retailers, unless you corrupt the proper person. It is all politics. All our politics is business and our business is politics.

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

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

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

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

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

The long and short of the matter is that the sudden creation of wealth in the United States has been too much for our people.55 We are personally dishonest. The people of the United States are notably and peculiarly dishonest in financial matters.

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

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

The unspoken religion of all sensible men inculcates thrift as the first virtue. Business thunders at the young man, “Thou shalt have none other gods but me.” Nor56 is it a weak threat, for business, when it speaks, means business. The young doctor in the small town who advocates reform loses practice for two reasons: first, because it is imagined that he is not a serious man, not a good doctor, if he gives time to things outside his profession; second, because the carriage-maker does not agree with him and regards it as a moral duty to punish him. The newsdealer in the Arcade at Rector Street lost custom because it was discovered that he was a Bryan man. The bankers would not buy papers of him. Since the days of David, the great luxury of the powerful has been to be free from the annoyance of other persons’ opinions. The professional classes in any community are parasites on the moneyed classes; they attend the distribution. They cannot strike the hand that feeds them. In a country where economic laws tend to throw the money into the hands of a certain type of men, the morality of those men is bound to affect society very seriously.

The world-famous “timidity” of Americans in matters of opinion, is the outward and visible sign of a mental preoccupation. Tocqueville thought it was due to their democratic form of government. It is not57 due to democracy, but to commercial conditions. In Tocqueville’s day it arose out of the slavery question, solely because that question affected trade.

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

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

We have seen that our more recent misgovernment58 has not been due to democracy, and we now see that the most striking weakness of our social life is not and never has been due to democracy.

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

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

It is difficult to speak out a sentiment that your table companions disapprove of. Even Don Quixote was afraid to confess that it was he who had set the convicts at liberty, because he heard the barber and curate denounce the thing as an outrage.59 Now the weight of this normal social pressure in any particular case will depend on how closely the individuals composing the majority resemble each other. But men, lighted by the same passion, pursuing one object under the similar conditions, of necessity grow alike. By a process of natural selection, the self-seekers of Europe have for sixty years been poured into the hopper of our great mill. The Suabian and the Pole each drops his costume, his language, and his traditions as he goes in. They come out American business men; and in the second generation they resemble each other more closely in ideals, in aims, and in modes of thought than two brothers who had been bred to different trades in Europe.

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

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

We have, then, two distinct kinds of pressure,60 each at its maximum, both due to commerce: the pressure of fear that any unpopular sentiment a man utters will show in his bank account; the pressure of a unified majority who are alike in their opinions, have no private opinions, nor patience with the private opinions of others. Of these two pressures, the latter is by far the more important.

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

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

We must never expect to find in a dogma the explanation of the system which it props up. That explanation must be sought for61 in history. The dogma records but does not explain a supremacy. Therefore, when we hear some one appeal to democratic principle for a justification in suppressing the individual, we have to reflect how firmly must this custom be established, upon what a strong basis of interest must it rest, that it has power so to pervert the ideas of democracy. A distrust of the individual running into something like hatred may be seen reflected in the press of the United States. The main point is that Americans have by business training been growing more alike every day, and have seized upon any and every authority to aid them in disciplining a recusant.

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

We must now add one dreadful fact: Many of these men at the club are dishonest. The banker has come from a Directors’ meeting of a large corporation, where he has voted to buy ten thousand shares of railroad stock which he and his associates bought on foreclosure at seventeen three weeks before, but which now stands at thirty, because the quotations62 have been rigged. The attorney for the corporation is here talking to Professor Scuddamore about the new citizens’ movement, which the attorney has joined, for he is a great reformer, and lives in horror of the wickedness of the times. Beyond him sits an important man, whose corporation has just given a large sum to a political organization. Next to him is a Judge, who is a Republican, but fond of a chat with political opponents. With them is the editor of a reform paper, whose financial articles are of much importance to the town. A very eminent lawyer is in conversation with him. This lawyer has just received a large fee from the city for work which would not have brought him more than one-fifth of the amount if done for a private client. He is, by the way, a law partner of the latest tribune of the people, a man of stainless reputation. Here is also another type of honor, the middle-aged practitioner of good family, who has one of the best heads in town. He knows what all these other men are, and how they make their money; yet he dines at their houses, and gets business from them. On his left is a man much talked of ten years ago, a rare man to be seen here. He was ambitious, and became the hope of reform.63 But, unfortunately, he also had a talent for business. He became rich and cynical, and you see that he is looking about, as if in search of another disappointed man to talk to. There also is a great doctor, visiting physician of three hospitals, one of which is in receipt of city funds, and he knows the practice of packing the hospitals before inspection day in order to increase the appropriation. The man who endowed the hospital sits beyond. All these wires end in this club-room. Now start your topic—jest about free silver, make a merry sally on Mayor Jones. Start the question: “Why is not the last reform commissioner of the gas works not in jail?” and see what a jovial crew you are set down with.

You will find as to any new topic, that each one requires time to adjust his cravat to it. You are in a company of men who are so anxious to be reasonable, to be “just,” that it will require them till judgment day to make up their minds on any point. Nor is it easy to say how any one of them ought to behave. Is it dishonest to draw dividends from a corporation which you believe to be corruptly managed; to wink at bribery done in the interest of widows and of orphans? Must you cut a client because he64 owns a judge? What proof have you of any of these things? Do you demand of any one of these men that he shall offend or denounce the rest, and, short of that, what course should he take?

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

The ill-concealed dependence of these men on each other is not resentful. They are the most good-natured men in the world. But they are unenlightened. Without free speech free thought can hardly exist. Without free speech you cannot gather the fruits of the mind’s spontaneous workings. When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise. He may strike out some idea which explains the sphinx. The moral consequences of circumspect and affable reticence are even worse than the intellectual ones. “Live and let65 live,” says our genial prudence. Well enough, but mark the event. No one ever lost his social standing merely because of his offences, but because of the talk about them. As free speech goes out the rascals come in.

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

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

In Europe, the men in the pit at the theatre stand up between the acts, face the house, and examine the audience at leisure. The American dares not do this. He cannot stand the isolation, nor the publicity. The American in a horse car can give his66 seat to a lady, but dares not raise his voice while the conductor tramps over his toes. It violates every instinct of his commercial body to thrust his private concerns into prominence. The American addresses his equal, whom he knows familiarly, as Mr. Jones, giving him the title with as much subserviency as the Englishman pays to an unknown Earl.

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

We have seen that the retailer in the small town could not afford to think clearly upon the political situation. But this was a mere instance, a sample of his mental attitude. He dare not face any question. He must shuffle, qualify, and defer. Here at last we have the great characteristic which67 covers our continent like a climate—intellectual dishonesty. This state of mind does not merely prevent a man having positive opinions. The American is incapable of taking a real interest in anything. The lack of passion in the American—noticeable in his books and in himself—comes from the same habitual mental distraction; for passion is concentration. Hence also the flippancy, superficiality, and easy humor for which we are noted. Nothing except the dollar is believed to be worthy the attention of a serious man. People are even ashamed of their tastes. Until recently, we thought it effeminate for a man to play on the piano. When a man takes a living interest in anything, we call him a “crank.” There is an element of self-sacrifice in any honest intellectual work which we detect at once and score with contumely.

It was not solely commercial interest that made the biographers of Lincoln so thrifty to extend and veneer their book. It was that they themselves did not, could not, take an interest in the truth about him. The second-rate quality of all our letters and verse is due to the same cause. The intellectual integrity is undermined. The literary man is concerned for what “will68 go,” like the reformer who is half politician. The attention of every one in the United States is on some one else’s opinion, not on truth.

The matter resolves itself at last into Pilate’s question: What is truth? We do not know, and shall never know. But it seems to involve a certain focussing and concentration of the attention that brings all the life within us into harmony. When this happens to us, we discover that truth is the only thing we had ever really cared about in the world. The thing seems to be the same thing, no matter which avenue we reach it by. At whatever point we are touched, we respond. A quartet, a cathedral, a sonnet, an exhibition of juggling, anything well done—we are at the mercy of it. But as the whole of us responds to it, so it takes a whole man to do it. Whatever cracks men up and obliterates parts of them, makes them powerless to give out this vibration. This is about all we know of individualism and the integrity of the individual. The sum of all the philosophies in the history of the world can be packed back into it. All the tyrannies and abuses in the world are only bad because they injure this integrity. We desire truth. It is the only thing we desire.69 To have it, we must develop the individual. And there are practical ways and means of doing this. We see that all our abuses are only odious because they injure some individual man’s spirit. We can trace the corruption of politics into business, and find private selfishness at the bottom of it. We can see this spread out into a network of invisible influence, in the form of intellectual dishonesty blighting the minds of our people. We can look still closer and see just why and how the temperament of the private man is expressed.

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

The rays of force which start in material prosperity pass through the focus of social life, and extend out into literature, art, architecture, religion, philosophy. All these things are but the sparks thrown off the gestures and gaits, the records of the social life of some civilization. That is the reason70 why it has been useful to pause over a club-house and study its inmates. The ball-room, the dinner-table, would have been equally instructive. The deference to reigning convention is the same everywhere. The instinct of self-concealment, the policy of classing like with like, leads to the herding of the young with the young only, the sporting with the sporting only, the rich with the rich only, which is the bane of our society. The suffocation is mitigated here and there by the influence of ambitious and educated women. They are doing their best to stem the tide which they can neither control nor understand. The stratification of our society, and its crystallization into social groups, is little short of miraculous, considering the lightning changes of scene. The nouveaux riches of one decade are the old noblesse of the next decade, and yet any particular set, at any particular time, has its exclusions, its code of hats and coats and small talk, which are more rigid than those of London.

The only place in the country where society is not dull is Washington, because in Washington politics have always forced the social elements to mix; because in Washington, some embers of the old ante-bellum society survived; because the place has no71 commerce, and because the foreign diplomats have been a constant factor, educating the Americans in social matters. But Washington is not the centre of American civilization. The controlling force in American life is not in its politics, but in commerce. New York is the head and heart of the United States. Chicago is America. And the elements of this life must be sought, as always, in the small towns. Find the social factors which are common to New York, to Poughkeepsie, and to Newport, and you have the keynote to the country. We began with a city club. But it would have made no difference what gathering we entered—a drawing-room at Newport, a labor union in Fifteenth Street—we should have found the same phenomena,—formalism, suppression of the individual, intellectual dishonesty.

The dandy at Newport who conscientiously follows his leaders and observes the cab rule, the glove ordinance, and the mystery of the oyster fork, is governed by the same law, is fettered by the same force, as the labor man who fears to tell his fellows that he approves of Waring’s clean streets. Each is a half-man, each is afraid of his fellows, and for the same reason. Each is commercial, keeps his place by conciliatory methods, and will72 be punished for contumacy by the loss of his job. Neither of them has an independent opinion upon any subject.

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

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

Now what is at the bottom of this identity? We are passing through the great age of distribution. It is not confined to America. It qualifies European history. All the different kinds of Socialism are mere proofs of it. Every one either wants to get something himself, or, if he is a philosopher, wants to show other people how to get it. Even Henry George thought that man lives73 by bread alone; at least, he thought that if you only give every one lots of bread, that is all you need provide for; the rest will follow. In America we are leading the world in the intensity with which this phase of progress goes on, because in America there is nothing else to occupy men’s minds. Let us return to our social focus and its relation to the arts.

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

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

Commercial or sexual crime or violence,74 that does not unman the artist, ought not to extinguish art, and it never has done so. Anything that has made him time-serving or truthless ought to show in his work, and it always has done so.

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

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

Take his clubs and his routs away from Thackeray, his hunting away from White-Melville, his peasantry away from Scott, his street life away from Dickens, and where would their books be? Vigorous and picturesque individuality must precede good fiction. The great American novel, except as the outcome of a vigorous social life, is the dream of an idiot. You must have an age of ebullition, where the spontaneous life about the novelist forces itself into his books, before you can have good fiction. Architecture depends so plainly upon social75 life, that we have only to look at our country houses from Colonial times down, to read the hearts of the inmates. And so with the other fine arts and decorations, they are mere languages.

It is thought that our modern life is more complex than that of the eighteenth century, because the machinery by which it is carried on is expanded. Transportation, newspapers, corporations, oceans of books and magazines, foreign cables, have changed the forms by which power is transmitted. But the manifestations of humanity in government, in social life, and in the arts proceed upon the same principles as ever. Everything depends as completely on personal intercourse as it did in Athens. The real struggle comes between two men across a table, my force against your force. The devices which political philosophy has always approved, are those which protect the spirit of the individual, and enable it to grow strong. The struggles for English liberty have been struggles over taxation. The rights of the sovereign to seize a man’s property, or imprison his body without form of law, were abolished. This comparative financial independence of the English subject has been valued as the basis of spiritual76 independence. It has no other claim to be thought important. Yet while we have been praising our bills of rights and bulwarks of liberty, commerce in the United States has been bringing power after power, battalion after battalion, to bear upon the integrity of spirit of the individual man. Here is a situation which no legislation can meet. Civil liberty has been submerged in the boss system. But this is a mere symptom. It is valuable only because it brings strikingly into view the intellectual bondage it denotes. It is valuable only because it gives us a fighting ground, an educational arena in which the fight for intellectual liberty may be begun.

It is unnecessary to go over the steps of the argument backward, and to show how our citizen movements are a mere sign that the individual is becoming more unselfish. How, partly through the settling of commerce into more stable conditions, partly through revulsion in the heart of man against so much wickedness, a reign of better things is coming. The Christian Endeavorers, the University Settlements, the innumerable leagues and propaganda which bring no dogmas, but which stand for faith—speak for multitudes, affect every one. Their influence77 can already be traced into business, into social life, and out again into every department of our existence. The revolution is going forward on a great scale, and the demonstration is about to be worked out throughout the continent as if it were a blackboard.

The man who has subscribed $1,000 to the reform campaign, the man who has worked for the cause, and the man who has voted the ticket, have met. This personal meeting, this social focus, exists and is indestructible. These people who have been kept apart by the old political conditions, by the boss system, and the capitalist; these men whom every element of selfishness and corruption fought with the instinct of self-preservation to keep separate, have come together. The downfall of the old social system, and the redistribution of every force in the community, is inevitable. In the first place, every individual in the community has talked about the movement with an intensity proportionate to his power of good. Our form of government throws the moral idea with terrible force, as a practical issue, into the life of each man. “Thou art the man.” The extreme simplicity of our social fabric78 makes it impossible for any one to get behind his institution, his class, his prejudice. There is no one who cannot be shown up. We are as defenceless before virtue as we were before selfishness. Our politics can be worked as effectively by one passion as by the other—but we are only just beginning to find this out.

Free speech and the grouping, classing, and mingling of men according to intellect, and not according to income, have begun already. They are not more the outcome than they are the cause of these citizens’ movements. They are the same elemental thing. The love of truth is the same passion as the veneration for the individual. It is impossible to really want reform and to remain socially exclusive or socially deferential. And so, a social life is beginning to emerge in New York, based on the noblest and the most natural passion that can stir in the heart of man The results in the field of practical politics, will be that “society”—at least such of our drawing-rooms and dinner tables as any one, whether foreigner or native, knows or cares anything about—will resume the political importance which such places have always held in civilized times, and of which nothing but extraordinary79 and transient conditions have deprived them. Let any one who doubts this, compare the club talk and dinner table talk of to-day, with the talk of ten years ago. It would be childish to guess the positive results on the arts, theatres, novels, verse which will follow; but you can no more keep the spirit of freedom out of these things than you can keep it out of personal manners. These are changing daily. The decorums and codes of behavior, the old self-consciousness and self-distrust are dropping off. Steadily the flood of life advances, inspiring all things.80

III
EDUCATION: FROEBEL

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

Froebel was an experimental psychologist who used the terms of the German philosophy of his day. But the facts of life, the thing he was studying, was never for a moment absent from his mind. He lived in an age when the ideas of evolution were in the air, and before they had received84 their conclusive proof by being applied to morphology.

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

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

His method of study was the only method which can obtain results in philosophy,85 self-study unconsciously carried on. He observed the child, and guessed at what was going on in its mind by a comparison with what he knew of himself. He was anxious to train young children intelligently, and he found it necessary to describe and formulate his knowledge of the operation of their minds. It turns out that he made a statement of the universe more comprehensive, a philosophy more universal, than any other of which we have any record.

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

The greatness of Froebel lies in this, that he saw the essential. What sort of an animal is man, asks the morphologist, for he is86 beginning to reach this point in his studies, and before he has asked it, Froebel has answered him.

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

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

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

Let us assume for a moment that these things are true, that they are the most important truths about the child; and let us see how they must affect our views of life, of politics, sociology, art, religion, conduct. There is of course no moment at which the87 child ceases to be a child. The laws of its growth and being are not at any discoverable time superseded by any new laws. Man as a creature, as an organism, has here by Froebel, and for the first time in history, been ingenuously studied, and the main laws of him noted. With the discovery that he is a unity, there vanishes every classification of science made since the days of Aristotle. They are convenient dogmas, thumb rule distinctions, useful as aids in the further pushing of our studies into the workings of this unity. Take up now a book of political economy, a poem, a history: this thought of Froebel’s runs through it like quicksilver. The scheme of thought of the writer is by it dissolved at once into human elements. You find you are studying the operation of the mind of some one, whom you picture to yourself as a man, as a unit; you are interpreting this by your own experience. It is all psychology, you are pushing your analysis. The universe is receiving its interpretation through you yourself. We are thus brought to the point of view of the mystic, as the only conceivable point of view.

“That the organism develops by creative activity.” This might have come as a deduction from Darwin. It is an expression88 in metaphysical language of the “struggle for life.” Froebel discovered it independently. The consequences of a belief in it are so tremendous, that no man who is not prepared to spend the rest of his life completely dominated by the idea, ought even to pause to consider it.

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

The connection between this thought and the previous one is apparent. It is only by such creative activity that the organism as a unit gets into play. If you set a man copying or memorizing, you have occupied only a fraction of him. If you set him to making something, the minute he begins, his attention is concentrated. Willy nilly he is trying to make something significant, he is endeavoring to express himself, the forces and powers within him begin coming to his succor, offering aid and suggestion. Before he knows it, his whole being is in operation. The result is a statement of some89 sort, and in the process of making it the creature has developed. But when you say “significant” you have already implied the existence of other organisms. He is not expressing himself only, he is expressing them all, and here comes Froebel with his third great discovery, that it is by constant personal intercourse with others that the power to express is gained. And on top of this comes the last law, so closely related to the third as to be merely a new view of it, but discovered by experiment, tested by practice, announced empirically and as a fact, that the child is unselfish and only really happy when at work creatively and for the use and behoof of others.

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

The matter is really very simple, for anything self-regardant means a return of the organism upon itself, a stepping on your90 own toes, and brings self-consciousness, discomfort, pain. Self-sacrifice on the other hand brings fulfilment. The self-sacrifice is always illusory, and the development real. This becomes frightfully apparent in ingenuous and unhappy love affairs, for the organism robbed of fulfilment returns upon itself.

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

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

The power and permanence of Sainte91 Beuve are due to his having applied this theory to the interpretation of literature. He is not content till he has seen the relation between the conduct and the opinions, the conduct and the art of a character.

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

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

Give me a man’s beliefs, and I will give you his occupation. What has happened to92 that radical that he seems to have become so moderate and reasonable? You find that for six months he has been clerk to the Civil Service Reform Club. Why is the mystical poetry of this intellectual man as vacant as the fashion print he edits for his daily bread? His employment has tracked his mind to these unearthly regions. He is dead here too.

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

Here is the most excellent gentleman in America, an old idealist untouchably transcendental, an educated man. To your93 amazement he thinks that it is occasionally necessary to subsidize the powers of evil. He was bred a banker.

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

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

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

You meet a man whom you have known as a court stenographer, and whom you have supposed to be drowned in worldly cares. At a chop house he gives you a discourse on Plato’s Phædrus which he interprets in a novel way. The brains of the man surprise you. This man, though he looks sordid, positively must have been sending a younger94 brother to college during many years. There is no other explanation of him.

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

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

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

But the worst is to come—the horror that makes intellect a plaything. By a double consequence the past fetters the future. Once take any course and our eyes begin to see it as right, our hearts to justify it. Only fighting can save us, and we see nothing95 to fight for. Thraldom enters and night like death where no voice reaches. The eternal struggle is for vision.

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

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

This reaction, this transformation goes forward in the very stuff that we are made of, and if we come to look at it closely, we are obliged to speak of it in terms of consciousness. There are so many different kinds of consciousness, that the best we can do is to remind some one else of the kind96 we mean. The hand of the violinist is unconscious to the extent that it is functioning properly, and as his command over music develops, this unconsciousness creeps up his arm and possesses his brain and being, until he, as he plays, is completely unself-conscious and his music is the mere projection of an organism which is functioning freely.

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

The discovery of Froebel was that this mastery over our own powers was to be obtained only through creative activity. The suggestion, it may be noted, is destined to reorganize every school of violin playing in Europe. For we have here the major canon of a rational criticism. We find that in the old vocabulary such words as genius, temperament, style, originality, etc., have always been fumblingly used to denote different97 degrees in which some man’s brain was working freely and with full self-consciousness. A deliverance of this kind has always been designated as ‘creative,’ no matter in what field it was found.

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

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

For note this, that while it takes the whole of a man to do anything true, no matter how small, anything that the whole of him does is right. Hence the inimitable grotesques of greatness, the puns in tragedy. These things belong to the very arcana of nature. By and by, when the reasons are98 understood, nature will be respected. No one will attempt to imitate genius, or to reproduce an artistic effect of any kind.

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

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

Everything good that has been done in the last fifty years has been done in the teeth of current science. The whole raft of English scientists are children playing with Raphael’s brushes the moment they leave some specialty. There never lived a set of men more blinded by dogma, blinded to the meaning of the past, to the trend of the future, by the belief that they had found new truth. Not one of them can lift the stone and show what lies under Darwin’s demonstration. They run about with little pamphlets and proclaim a New Universe like99 Frenchmen. They bundle up all beliefs into a great Dogma of Unbelief, and throw away the kernel of life with the shell. This was inevitable. A generation or two was well sacrificed, in this last fusillade of the Dogma of Science—the old guard dogma that dies but never surrenders. Hereafter it will be plain that the whole matter is a matter of symbols on the one hand, knowledge of human nature on the other.

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

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

We had almost thought that art was finished,100 and we find we are standing at the beginning of all things. Froebel has found a formula which fits every human activity.

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

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

But if a virtuous ruler be the prototype of all possible human fulfilment, there is no other art or province of employment to which the same views do not apply. When any man reaps some of the power which his toil has sown, and throws it out as a note or a book or a statue, it has an organic relation to the human soul and is valuable forever. There is only one rule of art. Let a man work at a thing till it looks right to him. Let him adjust and refine it till, as he looks at it, it passes straight into him, and he grows for a moment unconscious again, that101 the forces which produced it may be satisfied. As it stands then, it is the best he can do. In so far as we completely develop this power we become completely happy and completely useful, for our acts, our statements, our notes, our books, our statues become universally significant.

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

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

This philosophy which seemed so dry till we began to see what it meant, begins now to circumscribe God and include everything.102 For Christ himself was one whose thoughts were laws and whose deeds are universal truth. Shakespeare’s plays are universal truth. They are the projection of a completely developed and completely unconscious human intellect. They educated Germany, and it is to the study of them that Hegel’s view of life is due. The great educational forces in the world are proportioned in power to the development of the individual man in the epochs they date from. Here and there, out of a hotbed, arises a personal influence which directs thought for a thousand years and qualifies time forever.

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

All the virtues are different names for the injunction of self-mastery, by which the internal struggle is made more severe, and the103 force cooped in and controlled until it is released in the functioning of the whole man.

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

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

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

Man the microcosm is a kingdom where reigns continual war. Now he is a furnace of love, the next moment he is a mean scamp. We know very little about the mechanism by which these microcosms communicate with one another. It seems likely104 that every iota of feeling must be either transmitted or transformed; that if a spasm of selfishness be conveyed, or some part of it, even by a glimpse of the eye, it must leave a record of injury and start on a career of injury, just so much loss to the world. On the other hand it may be transformed into the other kind of force and expended later in good.

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

Let us press the inquest. It is not likely that life itself is duplex or consists of two kinds of force, one egoistic, one altruistic. The likelihood is the other way. There is105 only one force which vibrates through these organisms. It is absolutely beneficent only when it completely controls one of them, so that the whole thing sings together.

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

And man is more than a mere altruistic animal. At least the religions of Humanity have never expressed him. At those times when he is entirely unselfish and therefore entirely himself, when he feels himself to be one single well-spring, all unselfishness, all love, all reverence, all service to something not himself, yet something personal,106 he has faith. The theologies are attempts to formulate this state of mind in order that it may be preserved. It is clear enough that every mind must speak in its own symbols, and that the symbols of one must always appear to another as illusions. Yet each man for himself knows he faces a reality. This is a psychological necessity. Destroy the belief, and on the instant he changes. Show him that he is the victim of an illusion, and he is divided, a half man. A man whose mind is divided, as, for instance, by the consciousness of a personal motive, cannot believe. He stands like the wicked king in the play of Hamlet; unable to pray. It is a psychological impossibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beneath this statement there lies a law of110 reaction. The human organism responds in kind. Strike a man and he strikes, sneer and he sneers, forget and he forgets. If you wish to convince him that you are right, concede that from his point of view he is right, then move the point and he follows. If you keep your temper in teaching a child, you teach him to keep his temper, and this is more important than his lesson.

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

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

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

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

The view of man as an active animal, a struggler, alive and happy only in activity, falls in naturally with what we know of the animal kingdom. The philosophers are at war over science and religion, over the origin of the non-self-regarding instincts. By an external consideration of the animal hierarchy they have come to certain conclusions which they strive to apply to the highest animal, man. There is great boggling over him; because these non-self-regarding instincts, which are not very apparent from the outside, seem to conflict with certain generalizations relative to the conservation of species. The scientists look into a drop of water and see animals eating each other up. What they have not seen is that all this ferocity goes forward, subject to customs as rigid as a military code, and that it is this code which conserves the species. The “struggle for existence” as it is commonly112 conceived would exterminate in short order any species that indulged in it.

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

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

IV
DEMOCRACY

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

Again, it is impossible that all the officials should be elected, and the assignment to the elected officials of the power to appoint the others is a matter of convenience. The very simple expedients adopted by the framers of116 the United States Constitution were the result of English experience and French theory. The intellect of France had, during the eighteenth century, put into portable form the ideas that had been at work in England’s institutions. The theoretical part of it, the division of government into three departments, had been worked out from European experience going back to Greek times. The written constitution was a mere expansion of the Bill of Rights. Our Framers were men who had had personal experience in governing under the English system in force in the colonies, where the power of practical self-government had been developed by isolation. They received from the French a scientific view of that system. They had learned by experience that a confederacy was not a government, and they proceeded to bind the country together by the grant of that power which defines government, the power to tax. The extension to a large territory of a system which was in practical operation in all its parts, was in one sense a miracle of intelligence, in another sense it was the only conceivable solution of the problem of unity. Philosophers speak of Democracy as if it were the outcome of choice. It has been the outcome of events.117 No other system would have endured, and every formula of government that did not embody an old usage would have been transformed in ten years by the popular will into something that did.

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

A constitution is a profession of faith, a summary written on a bulletin board, and so far good. The United States had this advantage in starting upon her career, that the bulletin was a very accurate summary of existing customs, and was in itself an inspiring proof of the virtue of the people. We are driven into admiring the Colonists as among the most enlightened of their kind. It is true that the revolution was conducted, and the Constitution adopted by the activity of a small minority. But this is true of all revolutions. The point is that the leaders118 represented sense and virtue. The people followed.

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

Meanwhile civilization had been creeping westward in a margin of frontier life, conducted under these forms. Behind this moved a belt of farming and village life, at119 war with the backwoods ideals, but using the same forms of government. Then arose the railroad era and tore millions of money from the continent, heaped it in cities, obliterated State lines, centralized everything, controlled everything, ruled everybody—still under these forms.

Let us examine them.

The problem of government is to protect the individuals in a community against each other, and to protect them all against the rest of the world. The power to interfere and the power to represent must be lodged somewhere, and the question is how to arrange it so that this power shall not be turned against the people. Democracy solves it by election. Let the people choose their rulers. Instantly every man is turned into a custodian, a part of him is dedicated to the public. He is prevented by fundamental theory of law from being absolutely selfish. Corrupt him how you will, deflect him, play upon him, degrade, deceive him, you cannot shut him off from this influence. The framework of government makes continuous appeal to the highest within him. It draws him as the moon draws the sea. This appeal is one to which the organic nature of man responds, as we have seen.120 For man is an unselfish animal. The law of his nature is expressed in the framework of government. The arrangement shows a wisdom so profound that all historical philosophy grows cheap before it.

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

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

The creature man is by this system dealt with so simply as he had not been dealt with since the birth of Christ. It must be conceded that the thing could not even have been tried, except with a people familiar with the distinctions between legislative, executive, and judicial power, criminal and civil law, etc. Altruistic impulse would not have sufficed to execute itself. But the121 divisions and forms of thought expressive of that altruism already existed, and were in operation, as we have seen.

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

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

Democracy assumes perfection in human nature. In so far as an official or a voter is corrupt, you will have bad government. Or to put the same thing in another way, all122 corruption is shown up as a loss of the power of self-government. The framework of government lies there exposed in all its parts like a vast and complex dial, recording with the nicety of a scientific instrument every departure from virtue of the human beings whose lives, whose standards, whose very thoughts are registered against it. When selfishness reaches a certain point, the machine stops. Government by force comes in. We have had railroad riots and iron foundry riots. In Denver not many months ago thirty thousand people, or about one-fifth of the population, engaged in a carnival of destruction and raided a picnic given by the Cattle Association. These ebullitions, which look like mania, are nothing but an acute form of blind selfishness, due to the education of a period in which everything has been settled by an appeal to the self-interest of the individual. The Bryanism, with which we must all sympathize, is nothing but a revolt on the part of the poorer classes against the exploitation of the country by the capitalist, due to pension laws, tariffs, trusts, etc. “Something must now be done for me,” says the laboring man, and the mine owner says “Silver.” The appeal is by a little manipulation worked up into a craze,123 with the result that property is unsafe. The craze is a craze of mistaken selfishness. One of the weapons with which the richer classes fought it was corruption. They fed the element which was devouring them. There is talk of bayonets, and it is true that either bayonets or public spirit must in such cases be the issue. We cannot have property at the mercy of a mob, and if any single state like Colorado were separated from the rest, and the spirit of unreason should possess it utterly, government by force would ensue. Elections would be superseded, and property would improvise some mode of practical government which every intelligent man would back. The danger of an episode of this sort is that it interrupts the course of things. It is revolution. It is the breakdown of democracy, and tends to perpetuate the conditions of incompetence out of which the crisis arises. Fortunately the country is so large that one State holds up the next. No community would tolerate a state of siege for more than six months, and the State would return to educational methods, weaker but alive.

A military imposition of order is then the extreme case. But the Boss system is the halfway house in the breakdown of free124 government. In the Boss system we have seen a lack of virtue in the people show itself in the shape of a government, in fact autocratic, but in form republican. Here again the loss in the power of self-government is apparent.

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

If we now recur for a moment to the state of things described in the essay on politics, we see that our government in all its branches has reflected the occupation and spiritual state of the people very perfectly. But outside of the recurrent and regular political activity of the country, there has grown up during the past few years a sort of guerilla warfare of reform. This represents the conservative morality of the community, the instinct of right government which resents the treason to our institutions seen in their operation for private gain. The reformers’ methods of work are necessarily democratic, and it is here that the most125 delicate tests of self-seeking are to be found. These reformers desire to increase the unselfishness in the world, yet the moment they attempt a practical reform they are told that any appeal to an unselfish motive in politics means sure failure. They accordingly make every variety of endeavor to use the selfishness of some one as a lever to increase the unselfishness of somebody else. The thing is worked out in daylight time after time, year after year, and the results are recorded in millegrams. No obscurity is possible because every man stands on the same footing. Our minds are not obscured by thinking that A must be sincere because he is a bishop, or need not be sincere because he is a lord.

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

A reform movement employs a paid secretary. In so far as he gets the place because of his reform principles he represents an appeal to selfishness. This is instantly reflected in his associates, it colors the movement.126 He himself is attracted partly by the pay. By an operation as impossible to avoid as the law of gravity he enlists others who are also partially self-seeking.

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

The system lays bare the operation of forces hitherto merely suspected. Democracy makes the bold cut across every man and divides him into a public man and a private man. It is a man-ometer. You could by means of it stand up in line every man in New York, grading them according127 to the ratio of principle and self-interest in each.

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

The English, who gave us all we know of128 freedom, have been the first to understand its meaning. They too have suffered during the last century from the ravages of plutocracy, from the disease of commerce. But they had behind them the intellectual heritage of the world. They had bulwarks of education, philanthropy, thought, training, ambition, enthusiasm, the ideals of man. It was these things, this reservoir of spiritual power, that turned the tide of commercialism in England, and not as we so cheaply imagine her “leisure class.” The men and women who in the last ten years have taken hold of the Municipality of London, and now work like beavers in its reform, are not rich. Some of them may be rich, but the force that makes them toil comes neither out of riches nor out of poverty, but out of a discovery as to the use of life. These Englishmen have outlived the illusions of business. As towards them we are like children. If it were a matter of mere riches we have wealth enough to make their “leisure class” ridiculous. If there must be some term in the heaping of money before the energies of our better burghers are to be diverted toward public ends, we may wait till doomsday. But the reaction is of another sort, and is very simple. Let us be just to129 the conscience-givers. They dare not give more. The American is ashamed to lose a dollar. He does not want the dollar half the time, but he will lose caste if he foregoes it. Our merchant princes go on special commissions for rapid transit, and receive $5000 apiece. They must be paid. Out of custom they must receive pay because “their time is valuable,” and thus the virtue and meaning of their office receives a soil: they do not work. All this is, even at the present moment, against the private instincts of many of them. It is apparent that they stand without, shame-faced. It needs only example to give them courage. A few more reform movements in which they see each other as citizens, will knock the shackles from their imagination and make men of them. And then we shall have reform in earnest. For with this enfranchisement will come their great awakening to the fact that not they only but all men are really unselfish. It is the obscure disbelief in this salvation which has made reform so hard where it might be so easy. As soon as the reformers shall have reformed themselves, they will avoid making any appeal to self-interest as so much lost time, so much corruption, and will walk boldly upon130 the waves of idealism which will hold them up.

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

We find then in democracy a frame of government by which private selfishness, the bane and terror of all government, is thrust131 brutally to the front and kept there, staring in hideous openness.

Nothing except such an era as that which we have just come through, during which we have grown used to absolute self-seeking as the normal state of man, could so have glazed the eyes of men that they could not see thrift even in a public official as a crime, or self-sacrifice even in a public official except as a folly. And yet so sound is the heart of man that in spite of this corruption and debauchery, the American people, the masses of them, are the most promising people extant. We have a special disease. It is our minds which have been injured. We are cross-eyed with business selfishness and open to the heavens on all other sides. For this openness we must thank Democracy. Here are no warped beings, but sane and healthy creatures under a temporary spell. The American citizen, by escaping the superstitions studded over Europe since the days of the Roman empire, has a directer view of life (when he shall open his eyes) than any people since the Elizabethans. He will have no prejudices. He will be empirical. But he must forswear thrift, and the calculating of interest in his sleep. No religious revival will help us. We are religious132 enough already. It is our relaxation. Only the painful unwinding of that intellectual knot into which our minds are tied,—that state of intense selfishness during which we see business advancement as our first duty, taught us at the cradle, enforced by example, inculcated like a religion,—can make us begin to operate our institutions upon the lines on which they alone can run freely, and we ourselves develop normally. This unwinding will come through a simple inspection of our condition. Let no one worry about the forms and particular measures of betterment. They will flow naturally from the public acknowledgment by the individual of facts which he privately knows and has always known and always denied.

This goes on hourly. Those people who do not see it, look for it in the wrong places. You cannot expect it to show itself in the public offices. They are the strongholds of the enemy. You cannot expect it to appear very often in the children of captivity, the upper bourgeoisie. These men are easily put to sleep and will take the promise of a politician any day as an excuse for non-activity. They give consent. What we want is assertion, and it is coming like a murmur from the poorer classes who desire133 the right and who need only leadership to make them honest.

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

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

The example of a whole people, mad with one passion, living under a system which implies the abnegation of that passion, has laid bare the heart of a community, has shown the interrelations between the organs and functions of a society, in a way never before visible in the history of the world. Everything is disturbed, but everything is visible. We see Literature, a mere thread, yet betraying all things; Architecture, still134 submerged in commerce but showing every year some vital change; Social Life, the mere creature of abuses, like a child covered with scars, but growing healthy; the Drama, a drudge to thrift every way and yet palpably alive. By the light of these things and their relation to each other we may view history.

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

No wonder the sociologists study America. It seems as if the key and cause of human progress might be clutched from her entrails.135

V
GOVERNMENT

When two men are fighting and agree that they will stop at sundown, we have government. Their consent is government. Their memory of that consent is an institution. There never was a government of any kind or for any purpose that did not rest upon the consent of the governed; but the means by which the consent is obtained have varied. The consent records the extent to which the individuals are alike. It is only by virtue of similarity in the governed that government exists. On a ship, all men are alike in their danger of being drowned, and they consent to dictation from the captain for the welfare of all. The aim of the despot is to keep the population alike in their need of him or their fear of him. After the French Revolution, the entire French people were alike both in their desire for order and in their lack of training in self-government. A dictator was inevitable. Gouverneur Morris, whose138 experience in America qualified him to judge, saw the matter clearly as early as 1791. Napoleon kept the people alike, by the two opposite means of giving them social order and foreign war. Henry V. kept himself on top in England by waging war in France. Seward in 1861 thought to unite the people of the United States by declaring war against everybody in Europe. The German Emperor is sustained to-day by the popular fear of France and Russia. It makes no difference what foolishness he commits; so long as that fear predominates he will be absolute.

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

The extent to which people are similar to each other will be recorded in their institutions; in fact, those institutions are nothing139 but dials of similarity. For this reason any popular national institution gives you the nation. Moreover any ruler, any system, any consent has a tendency to modify the future because he or it is advertised and established. It is a factor in the consciousness of every individual. It is the conservative. It tends to affect the conduct and mind of every one, for any one coming in contact with it must conform or resist. It is a challenge to the individual. It impinges upon him. The thing changes daily in his mind, and occupies now more, now less, of his activities. In cases where his whole external conduct has been absorbed by one such power we have absolute rule, religious or military, and a uniform population. If there be a single predominating power which has not yet completely conquered, we have in some form or another a record of its growth by a tendency toward absolutism.

The American people have been growing strikingly uniform, owing to their one occupation,—business, their one passion,—a desire for money. They are divided by their system of politics into two great categories, and hence we see the two opposing Bosses, little nodes of power representing this identity140 of consciousness in each of the two great categories of the population, Republicans and Democrats. If you could cut open the consciousness of one thousand Americans and examine it with a microscope, you could set up our government with great ease.

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

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

Let us now suppose you to examine one thousand English heads. The first thing you would notice would be that the number was not large enough to give reliable results. Certain types would be manifest, but the special variations would be so striking as to cloud your conclusions. In all these141 heads there would be spots of a density nowhere found in America, but the spontaneous variations outside and round about them would be magnificent. You would say, “These spots represent different kinds of conservatism. This one is reverence for the church, that one for the army, a third for the judiciary. They represent prejudice, but they also represent stability, a stability that is the resultant of a thousand positive and various forces. These spots hold England together and give scope to free government. The world never has done and never can do better than this. These individuals are developed. The line of force of one man passes through one institution, that of the next man through the next. No force, no passion, can make them all alike at any one time. They are anchored by the Middle Ages. They are fluid and free in the present. The only hope for freedom in the individual lies in the existence of different sorts of institutions.”

It is true that English society is like a menagerie, or rather like one of those collections of different animals, all in one cage, seen at the circus. Every one of these animals is trained to regard the rights of the rest. Diversity is in itself a good. A college142 of Jesuits is a protection to liberty if it is set down in Denver. The Jesuits are not money-mad. It is an education for a Denver child to see a new kind of man. You will conclude, as some philosophers are now concluding, that to have free government you must encourage institutions—and you will be wrong.

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

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

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

It is to institutions that the consent to be governed is given. The consent is always a highly complex affair. It implies a civilization. It is qualified, limited, infinitely diversified, and is in every case regulated by historic fact. For instance, under a limited monarchy, it is a consent to be governed by a particular dynasty after special ceremonies, tempered by some priesthood, subject to such and such customs,—each and all existing in the imagination of the subject. For government is entirely a matter of the imagination, and it is inconceivable that it should ever be anything else. The English have spent two centuries in impressing the imagination of India with the vision of English power. A violation by the government,144 no matter how strong, of the popular imagination, an assumption of power in a field not yet subdued, always brings on riots. The Persians resented furiously the creation of a tobacco monopoly. The Sultan had to rescind it. The Americans threw the tea into the harbor.

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

The great unifying forces have always been regarded as dangers to free government. War makes a nation a unit. It cannot be conducted by individualism. Religion condenses power. That is the reason why our ancestors were so afraid of a State church. Commerce has generally been thought a blessing because commerce gives scope to individualism. It enriches and145 educates. Yet commerce itself may bring in tyranny. Witness Venice. Commerce has centralized our government. Anything that affects everybody’s mind with the same appeal strengthens government and makes for unity. A nation only exists by virtue of such general appeals. It is inside of and subordinate to this general unity of feeling that individualism must go on. The rulers of mankind are men who have got control of the symbols, of the institutions, which stood in the imagination of the people as most important, and who by manipulating them extended their range over the popular imagination. Or to put the thing a little differently, the passions of the people are reflected in ever-changing institutions. The people seize a man and force him to do their bidding and rule them in such manner as to assuage their passions. They make a saint out of Lincoln, and a devil out of Torquemada.

If a man seems to be a great man, and seems to be leading the people, it is because he knows the people better than they know themselves. There was never a people yet that did not in this sense govern themselves, being themselves governed by the resultant of their dominant passions. The146 Southern Pacific Railroad has for years owned the State of California as completely as if it had bought it from a tyrant who ruled over a population of slaves. It was done by the purchase of votes. In so far as virtue shall regain predominance in the breast of the voter and set him free, virtue will replace money in the voting, and set free the State.

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

It is thus apparent that there is no institution that cannot easily be made to operate to a contradictory end. The criminal courts here have been used to collect debt. There is no wickedness to which the enginery of the Christian Church has not at one time or another been lent. The passions of a147 period run its institutions as easily as a stream turns any sort of a mill. To-day the United States Senate is a millionaires’ club. To-morrow the Stock Exchange may become a church.

Now what is an institution?

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

Now what is at the bottom of all this regard for custom? At the bottom of custom is non-self-regarding impulse. Man is both selfish and unselfish, but it makes a great difference whether we regard him primarily as one thing or the other. The scientists, owing to their study of the lower animals, have tried to explain man on the148 selfish hypothesis and have made a mystery of him. They say “He must eat or die; therefore, he must be primarily egoistic.” And they attempt to explain progress by the expanding of egoism to include, first the family, then the tribe, then the nation, and finally mankind. Society according to them is a convention of egoism, a compromise, a joint-stock company. Religion is a matter of ghosts and ancestor worship, not fully explained yet. Note that this whole view depends upon a dogma that man must be primarily selfish because he must eat. It is fair enough to retort with a paradox. Man absolutely selfish could not survive. Man absolutely unselfish would thrive splendidly. The individuals would support each other.

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

It is the same with every human institution. Non-self-regardant impulse is at the bottom of all regard for law. We have seen149 that Democracy is organized altruism, but there was never a government that did not profess to be organized altruism. You cannot bring men together on any other plea, nor hold them together by any other tie. It is only in so far as altruism in conduct exists that progress is possible. If the men will not stop fighting at sundown, they have no institutions. They perish.

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

But reverence may become intensified into fear. The imagination of the worshipper curls over like a wave. It looks back at him and frightens him, and when this happens we call it Superstition. The pain of it, like all pain, like the distress of insanity, comes wholly from the fact that it is a self-regarding emotion, it is a disease. Man in every stage of his culture is liable to this disease. Want of food or tyranny, bad water or bad government, brings on150 this trouble. Every country and every age shows forms of it: and very naturally, the savage who is subject by reason of hardships to many diseases, shows terrible forms of this disease of superstition. This is the chief fact that the scientists have seen in the savage. These savants, holding the egoism of man as their major thought, have through their ignorance of human nature been led to base their explanation of the religion of mankind upon a disease of the savage.

The opposite explanation stares them in the face. We all know in a general way that the New Testament civilized Europe. The book is a mere cryptogram of all possible altruism, and therefore fits the soul of man. Give two men the New Testament—and each man sees himself in it, and it affects each one differently. By developing and unfolding the character and emotions of each according to the law of his individual growth, the book differentiates them at once. The more unhappy a man is the more he needs it. Oppress a man or put him in jail, let him lead a life of self-indulgence, or isolation, and he grows quasi-religious; the altruistic emotion has not been expended in intercourse with his fellows, and it accumulates. This book then, by focussing the altruism151 in each individual of many generations of men, by being perpetually rediscovered, by existing as a constant force differentiating individuals and so undoing the tyranny of institution after institution founded upon itself, gradually got itself enacted into international law, into custom, into sentiment, and into municipal rule, and has been on the whole the controlling force in Western Europe during the last eighteen centuries. Its symbols express the constant factor in human nature. It is only in so far as a book does this that it is remembered at all.

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

In studying the effect of institutions upon the individual, the whole hierarchy of nature must be reviewed at once. We have nothing to guide us in our study of the animals except our knowledge of man, but we have much to find in that study which will enlarge152 and illustrate that knowledge. Every naturalist and every sociologist should receive his preliminary training in the political arena, and every politician in the greenhouse and the menagerie.

Let us look at the social life of the ants.

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

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

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

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

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

The genesis of the emotions proceeds like other developments from the simple towards the complex. The notion that the egoism of man gradually expanded so as to include the whole human race in a love which was in reality a love of himself, assumes that154 this large love is the sum of lesser loves. It fixes the attention on the objects of human feeling, and not upon the character of the feeling itself. This character is the thing to be studied. When we contrast the religious and social feelings of the civilized man with those of the savage we see the same specialization and complexity in the emotions themselves which is traceable in any higher development. The forms, arguments, theories, customs by which the feeling is expressed, show an ever-increasing refinement of sympathy. We are not approaching a general and vague emotion built up out of lesser regards for particular people. We are approaching a stage of differentiation, of analysis, a stage of the personal application of that same altruism which appears in its lower form as blind worship and self-abasement before some fetich. The utility of this emotion, in whatever stage of its development, is a consideration that may justify it to the philosopher, but which is not the primum mobile in the breast of him that has it. The whole history of man shows that progress comes in the shape of an increasing tender-heartedness which can give no lucid account of itself, because it is an organic process.

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

Meanwhile, the actual genealogy of our own religious feelings is neglected as too familiar. Yet the spiritual history of that race which gave Europe many of its religions, is better known than any other history of a like antiquity. The point of view and feeling about life which has given us our own experience of religion was developed in the Jew. The Old Testament is the place in which to study the growth and meaning of the only religious feeling that we are sure we understand. The history of the Jews is the history of a single overpowering emotion which appears in its two156 forms,—so identical in content that you may often find them both in the same sentence, both in the same verse of Isaiah or Psalm of David,—prostration before the Lord of Hosts, compassion for the poor and the oppressed. This passion of altruism which gave the prophets their terrible power is the legacy of the Jew to the world. The emotion of self-abasement and self-sacrifice and the emotion of love towards others, are one thing. This, in its lower forms, leads to self-mutilation and incantations; in its higher forms, it becomes embodied by the prophetic fury of great poets into the idea of a Messiah who shall be both savior and sacrifice. There is only one passion at work in all these great protagonists of human nature, in Nathan, Elijah, Jeremiah and in the innumerable prophets who confronted the arbitrary power of the kings. These men stood for righteousness and showed an intensity of moral courage which nothing but compassion has ever engendered, and nothing but faith has ever expressed. The rags and the self surrender, the purity and the power, the belief that they spoke not of themselves but for the Lord, have been the same in all ages. It is impossible to feel compassion in this degree and not express it157 in this manner. All just anger is compassion. The terrible wrath of these men is as comprehensible as their hymns or their triumph. There is no child that reads Isaiah whose nature does not respond to him, because the course of feeling in him is true to life. Between the Old Testament and the New we see a perfectly coherent development of the same passion of the same race into its higher kind. Both forms of it have changed. In the New Testament the love has become specialized into that particular and especial regard for the soul of each individual man for which we have no counterpart; and the prostration, the adoration for God the Father, the identification of the individual with God the Father, has received expression in forms which one can refer to but not describe. The kingdom of heaven is within you.

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

The love of man for his fellows is the substantial content of every ideal, of every158 reform. In so far as any political cry is valuable, it represents this and nothing more. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, The Declaration of Independence, Utilitarianism, Fourierism, Socialism, Prohibition, Christian Science and the Salvation Army carry the same message; and it is only because of this truth, and in spite of the fact that it is always wrapped up in every kind of falsehood, that they move the world forward. Take socialism. This thing is the logical outcome of the passion of pity at work in men who believe that the desire for property is the controlling factor in human arrangements. The selfishness of the individual has been assumed as a fundamental law in that school of thought, which has been dominating all our thought, and which we habitually accept as final. It receives support from a superficial view of human nature, and time out of mind has been the belief of shallow people. But the great intellect and the great labor of the socialists have been unable to make any impression upon the mind of a man. We know that their reasoning is foolish. It is to the heart that their appeal is made. Bellamy’s book sells by the hundred thousand to tender-hearted people. It is a plea for humanity. It is Uncle159 Tom’s Cabin. The function of Socialism is clear. It is a religious reaction going on in an age which thinks in terms of money. We are very nearly at the end of it, because we are very nearly at the end of the age. Some people believe they hate the wealth of the millionaire. They denounce corporations and trusts, as if these things had hurt them. They strike at the symbol. What they really hate is the irresponsible rapacity which these things typify, and which nothing but moral forces will correct. In so far as people seek the cure in property-laws they are victims of the plague. The cure will come entirely from the other side; for as soon as the millionaires begin to exert and enjoy the enormous power for good which they possess, everybody will be glad they have the money.

Socialism was useful, but as a theory it was fated from the beginning, because its prophets and saints are themselves spurred on by a different motive from that which they evoke in others. They offer us a religion that assumes that human nature is other than it is, a religion not based upon self-sacrifice, and so not based upon an appeal to primary passion, a religion beseeching us to make other people comfortable. Now the160 only motive which will make men labor for the comfort of others, is a belief that this is the quickest way of saving their souls. If souls are to be saved only through their own unselfish activity, then it is a lie to hold up property as a goal. The laboring man can be made happy only by the same means as the merchant. They must be saved together. The matter of the physical support of the individual follows in the wake of a regard for his soul, but never precedes it. The awakening of the spirit of individualism will bring support to the artisan by bringing in hand work. The machine work with which we have been content represents a loss of religion in the buyer proportionate to the selfishness of the times. No system based on thrift will displace it, but any movement based on self-sacrifice will tend to correct it. While socialism is worrying out the proof that a wise distribution of property will bring in virtue and happiness, other and directer formulations of the truth will have seized the spirits of men and saved the people.

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

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

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

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

Napoleon is a type of selfishness. The focus of his almost illimitable intelligence fell within himself. He was so self-centred that he did not precipitate all the passion which supported him upon an idea. He did much, but he could not transcend the laws of psychology or escape the insecurity they dealt him out. He was a great reactionary, living in an age of progress, a great egoist in an age of altruism, a great criminal. The whole of Europe had hardly strength enough to shut him up. He went down finally, and yet before he went down, he had stood for civilization in every country he touched by establishing law. He gave France his code and his bureaux, things162 greater than his dynasty. He made use of the enlightenment, the expert intellect of France to establish order, and became a great educator through his institutions, his genius for administration. His worshippers are so struck with this side of his character that they forgive him his crimes. For our admiration is chained to the educator. Every great man is a great educator, and there is no greatness but this. The great man represents, draws out, projects, and establishes the non-self-regarding part, the intellectual apparatus of others, and those who do it by the establishment of law and order receive their tribute as civilizers. The saints serve the same end. They speak a language different from that of the law-givers, yet their function is the same. The part a man plays in the formal government of his times depends on circumstance. It seems to be governed by the ratio of his altruism to that of his contemporaries. People will not tolerate a man who is too good or too bad. Had Napoleon lived in an age of retrogression, very likely he would have died upon the throne. Had he been less self-seeking than he was, had he possessed for instance the imagination of Washington, very likely the French would163 have deposed him sooner, but in the end the memory of him would have educated France.

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

Another gigantic educator was Bismarck. To have welded the squabbling principalities of Germany into an Empire within a lifetime is one of the achievements of history. But Bismarck held the trump card. He had a cause to serve. His early work164 must have been his strongest; for since the war with France, patriotism has become the curse of Germany. It is caked into fanaticism, and is being used by autocracy to ruin intellect. This is the mystical yet relentless punishment for the element which was not patriotism but thrift in their conduct. The Germans must be great and unified and recover Alsace for their honor. But what did they want with the French milliards? They mulcted France to spare their pockets, and fastened upon themselves the personal hatred of the French peasant, which gives them William II. for a ruler. They looked upon property as power. Had they seen clearly that power is nothing but sentiment, they would have sown peace.

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

In the long run virtue and vice contend over national wealth, the first collecting, the second dissipating. Witness Cuba. Witness Ireland. China is wrecked by private165 greed. In the last analysis it is a matter of personal virtue.

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

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

This system will not apply here. We are the youngest nation and the most naif. We are at the mercy of wise or unwise treatment. But we can no more be fooled than a child. No display of force could touch our imagination or do more than irritate us. Our feelings must be directly engaged by means not known to diplomacy or to international166 law. Let England take a high tone. She must not only seem but be unselfish towards us, and she will master the globe.

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