Chapter V: Government 137 (3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEMOCRACY

IV

DEMOCRACY

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us examine them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GOVERNMENT

V

GOVERNMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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