Chapter VII: Conclusion 135 (2)

We have, perhaps, followed in the wake of some little Reform movement, and it has left us with an insight into the relation between private opinion and public occurrences. We have really found out two things: first, that in order to have better government, the talk and private intelligence upon which it rests must be going forward all the time; and second, that the individual conscience, intelligence, or private will is always set free by the same process,--to wit, by the telling of truth. The identity between public and private life reveals itself the instant a man adopts the plan of indiscriminate truthtelling. He unmasks batteries and discloses wires at every dinner-party; he sees practical politics in every law office, and social influence in every convention; and wherever he is, he suddenly finds himself, by his own will or against it, a centre of forces. Let him blurt out his opinion. Instantly there follows a little flash of reality. The shams drop, and the lines of human influence, the vital currents of energy, are disclosed. The only difference between a reform movement, so-called, and the private act of any man who desires to better conditions, is that the private man sets one drawing-room in a ferment by speaking his mind or by cutting his friend, and the agitator sets ten thousand in a ferment by attacking the age.

As a practical matter, the conduct of politics depends upon the dinner-table talk of men who are not in politics at all. Government is carried on from moment to moment by the people. The executive is a mere hand and arm. For instance, there is a public excitement about Civil Service Reform. A law is passed and is being evaded. If the governor is to set it up again, he must be sustained by the public. They must follow and understand the situation or the official is helpless. But do we sustain him? We do not. We are half-hearted. To lend power to his hand we shall have to be strong men. If we now stood ready to denounce him for himself falling short by the breadth of a hair of his whole duty, our support, when we gave it, would be worth having. But we are starchless, and deserve a starchless service.

What did you find out at the last meeting of the Library Committee? You found out that Commissioner Hopkins’s nephew was in the piano business; hence the commissioner’s views on the music question. Repeat it to the first man you meet in the street, and bring it up at the next meeting of the committee. You did not think you had much influence in town politics, and hardly knew how to step in. Yet the town seems to have no time for any other subject than your attack on the commissioner. From this point on you begin to understand conditions. Every man in town reveals his real character, and his real relation to the town wickedness and to the universe by the way he treats you. You are beginning to get near to something real and something interesting. There is no one in the United States, no matter how small a town he lives in, or how inconspicuous he or she is, who does not have three invitations a week to enter practical politics by such a door as this. It makes no difference whether he regard himself as a scientific man studying phenomena, or a saint purifying society; he will become both. There is no way to study sociology but this. The books give no hint of what the science is like. They are written by men who do not know the world, but who go about gleaning information instead of trying experiments.

The first discovery we make is that the worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer. If there is any truth in the optimistic belief that our standards are now going up, we shall soon see proofs of it in our homes. We shall not note our increase of virtue so much by seeing more crooks in Sing Sing, as by seeing fewer of them in the drawing-rooms. You can acquire more knowledge of American politics by attacking, in open talk, a political lawyer of social standing, than you can in a year of study. These backstair men are in every Bar Association and every Reform Club. They are the agents who supervise the details of corruption. They run between the capitalist, the boss, and the public official. They know as fact what every one else knows as inference. They are the priestly class of commerce, and correspond to the intriguing ecclesiastics in periods of church ascendency. Some want money, some office, some mere power, others want social prominence; and their art is to play off interest against interest and advance themselves.

As the president of a social club I have a power that I can use against my party boss or for him. If he can count upon me to serve him at need, it is a gain to him to have me establish myself as a reformer. The most dependable of these confidence men (for they betray nobody, and are universally used and trusted) can amass money and stand in the forefront of social life; and now and then one of them is made an archbishop or a foreign minister. They are, indeed, the figure-heads of the age, the essence of all the wickedness and degradation of our times. So long as such men enjoy public confidence we shall remain as we are. They must be deposed in the public mind.

And yet these gentlemen are the weakest point in the serried ranks of iniquity. They are weak because they have social ambition, and the place to reach them is in their clubs. They are the best possible object lessons, because everybody knows them. Social punishment is the one cruel reality, the one terrible weapon, the one judgment against which lawyers cannot protect a man. It is as silent as theft, and it raises the cry of “Stop thief!” like a burglar alarm.

The general cowardice of this age covers itself with the illusion of charity, and asks, in the name of Christ, that no one’s feelings be hurt. But there is not in the New Testament any hint that hypocrites are to be treated with charity. This class is so intrenched on all sides that the enthusiasts cannot touch them. Their elbows are interlocked; they sit cheek by jowl with virtue. They are rich; they possess the earth. How shall we strike them? Very easily. They are so soft with feeding on politic lies that they drop dead if you give them a dose of ridicule in a drawing-room. Denunciation is well enough, but laughter is the true ratsbane for hypocrites. If you set off a few jests, the air is changed. The men themselves cannot laugh or be laughed at; for nature’s revenge has given them masks for faces. You may see a whole room full of them crack with pain because they cannot laugh. They are angry, and do not speak.

Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same,--hardihood. Give them raw truth. They think they will die. Their friends call you a murderer. Four thousand ladies and eighty bank directors brought vinegar and brown paper to Low when he was attacked, and Roosevelt posed as a martyr because it was said, up and down, that he acted the part of a selfish politician. What humbug! How is it that all these things grow on the same root,--fraud, cowardice, formality, sentimentalism, and a lack of humor? Why do people become so solemn when they are making a deal, and so angry when they are defending it? The righteous indignation expended in protecting Roosevelt would have founded a church.

The whole problem of better government is a question of how to get people to stop simpering and saying “After you” to cant. A is an aristocrat. B is a boss. C is a candidate. D is a distiller. E is an excellent citizen. They dine. Gloomy silence would be more respectable than this chipper concern that all shall go well. Is not this politics? Yes, and the very essence of it. Is not the exposure of it practical reform? How easily the arrow goes in! A does not think you should confound him with B, nor E with C. Each is a reformer when he looks to the right, and a scamp as seen from the left. What is their fault? Collusion. “But A means so well.” They all mean well. Let us not confound the gradations of their virtue; but can we call any one an honest man who knowingly consorts with thieves? This they all do. Let us declare it. Their resentment at finding themselves classed together drives the wedge into the clique.

Remember, too, that there is no such thing as abstract truth. You must talk facts, you must name names, you must impute motives. You must say what is in your mind. It is the only means you have of cutting yourself free from the body of this death. Innuendo will not do. Nobody minds innuendo. We live and breathe nothing else. If you are not strong enough to face the issue in private life, do not dream that you can do anything for public affairs. This, of course, means fight, not to-morrow, but now. It is only in the course of conflict that any one can come to understand the system, the habit of thought, the mental condition, out of which all our evils arise. The first difficulty is to see the evils clearly; and when we do see them it is like fighting an atmosphere to contend against them. They are so universal and omnipresent that you have no terms to name them by. You must burn a disinfectant.

We have observed, thus far, that no question is ever involved in practical agitation except truth-telling. So long as a man is trying to tell the truth, his remarks will contain a margin which other people will regard as mystifying and irritating exaggeration. It is this very margin of controversy that does the work. The more accurate he is, the less he exaggerates, the more he will excite people. It is only by the true part of what is said that the interest is roused. No explosion follows a lie.

The awaking of the better feelings of the individual man is not only the immediate but the ultimate end of all politics. Nor need we be alarmed at any collateral results. No one has ever succeeded in drawing any valid distinction between positive and negative educational work, except this: that in so far as a man is positive himself, he does positive work. It is necessary to destroy reputations when they are lies. Peace be to their ashes. But war and fire until they be ashes. This is positive and constructive work. You cannot state your case without using popular illustrations, and in clearing the ground for justice and mercy, some little great man gets shown up as a make-believe. This is constructive work.

It is impossible to do harm to reform, unless you are taking some course that tends to put people to sleep. Strangely enough, the great outcry is made upon occasions when men are refusing to take such a course. This is due to the hypnotism of self-interest. “Don’t wake us up!” they cry, “We cannot stand the agony of it;” and the rising energy with which they speak wakes other sleepers. In the early stages of any new idea the only advertising it gets is denunciation. This is so much better than silence, that one may hail it as the dawn. You must speak till you draw blood. The agitators have always understood this. Such men as Wendell Phillips were not extravagant. They were practical men. Their business was to get heard. They used vitriol, but they were dealing with the hide of the rhinoceros.

If you look at the work of the anti-slavery people by the light of what they were trying to do, you will find that they had a very clear understanding of their task. The reason of some of them canted a little from the strain and stress; but they were so much nearer being right-minded than their contemporaries that we may claim them as respectable human beings. They were the rock on which the old politics split. They were a new force. As soon as they had gathered head enough to affect political issues, they broke every public man at the North by forcing him to take sides. There is not a man of the era whom they did not shatter. Finally their own leaders got into public life, and it was not till then that the new era began. The same thing is happening to-day. It is the function of the reformer to crack up any public man who dodges the issue of corruption, or who tries to ride two horses by remaining a straight party man and shouting reform. This is no one’s fault. It is a natural process. It is fate. Some fall on one side of the line, and some on the other. One gets the office, and the next loses it; but oblivion yawns for all of them. There is no cassia that can embalm their deeds; they can do nothing interesting, nothing that it lies in the power of the human mind to remember. Why is it that Calhoun’s Speeches are unreadable? He had the earnestness of a prophet and the strength almost of a Titan; but he was engaged in framing a philosophy to protect an interest. He was maintaining something that was not true. It was a fallacy. It was a pretence. It was a house built on the sands of temporary conditions. Such are the ideas of those middling good men, who profess honesty in just that degree which will keep them in office. Honesty beyond this point is, in their philosophy, incompatible with earthly conditions. These men must exist at present. They are an organic product of the times; they are samples of mediocrity. But they have nothing to offer to the curiosity of the next generation. No, not though their talent was employed in protecting an Empire--as it is now employed in eking out the supremacy of a disease in a country whose deeper health is beginning to throw the poison off.

Our public men are confronted with two systems of politics. They cannot hedge. If the question were suddenly to be lost in a riot, no doubt a good administrator might win applause, even a Tammany chief. But we have no riots. We have finished the war with Spain, and, unless foreign complications shall set in, we are about to sit down with the politicians over our domestic issue--theft. Are you for theft or against it? You can’t be both; and your conversation, the views you hold and express to your friends, are the test. It is only because politics affect or reflect these views that politics have any importance at all. Your agents--Croker, Hanna--are serving you faithfully now. Nothing else is to be heard at the clubs but the sound of little hammers riveting abuse.

* * * * *

There is another side to this shield that calls not for scorn but for pity. Have you ever been in need of money? Almost every man who enters our society joins it as a young man in need of money. His instincts are unsullied, his intellect is fresh and strong, but he must live. How comes it that the country is full of maimed human beings, of cynics and feeble good men, and outside of this no form of life except the diabolical intelligence of pure business?

How to make yourself needed,--it is the sycophant’s problem; and why should we expect a young American to act differently from a young Spaniard at the Court of Philip the Second? He must get on. He goes into a law office, and if he is offended at its dishonest practices he cannot speak. He soon accepts them. Thereafter he cannot see them. He goes into a newspaper office, the same; a banker’s, a merchant’s, a dry-goods’ shop. What has happened to these fellows at the end of three years, that their minds seem to be drying up? I have seen many men I knew in college grow more and more uninteresting from year to year. Is there something in trade that desiccates and flattens out, that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there is. It is not due to trade, but to intensity of self-seeking, combined with narrowness of occupation. If I had to make my way at the court of Queen Elizabeth, I should need more kinds of wits and more knowledge of human nature than in the New York button trade. No doubt I should be a preoccupied, cringing, and odious sort of person at a feudal festivity; but I should be a fascinating man of genius compared to John H. Painter, who at the age of thirty is making $15,000 a year by keeping his mouth shut and attending to business. Put a pressure gauge into Painter, and measure the business tension at New York in 1900. He is passing his youth in a trance over a game of skill, and thereby earning the respect and admiration of all men. Do not blame him. The great current of business force that passes through the port of New York has touched him, and he is rigid. There are hundreds of these fellows, and they make us think of the well-meaning young man who has to support his family, and who must compete against them for the confidence of his business patrons. Our standard of commercial honesty is set by that current. It is entirely the result of the competition that comes from everybody’s wanting to do the same thing.

“But,” you say, “we are here dealing with a natural force. If you like, it withers character, and preoccupies one part of a man for so long that the rest of him becomes numb. He is hard and queer. He cannot write because he cannot think; he cannot draw because he cannot think; he cannot enter real politics because he cannot think. He is all the wretch you depict him, but we must have him. Such are men.” This is the biggest folly in the world, and shows as deep an intellectual injury in the mind that thinks it as self-seeking can inflict. Business has destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except business.

What shall we do to diminish this awful pressure that makes politics a hell, and wrings out our manhood, till (you will find) the Americans condone the death of their brothers and fathers who perished in home camps during the Spanish war, because it all happened in the cause of trade, it was business thrift, done by smart men in pursuance of self-interest? You ask what you can do to diminish the tension of selfishness, which is as cruel as superstition, and which is not in one place, but everywhere in the United States. It runs a hot iron over young intellect, and crushes character in the bud. It is blindness, palsy, and hip disease. You can hardly find a man who has not got some form of it. There is no newspaper which does not show signs of it. You can hardly find a man who does not proclaim it to be the elixir of life, the vade-mecum of civilization. What can you do? Why, you can oppose it with other natural forces.

You yourself cannot turn Niagara; but there is not a town in America where one single man cannot make his force felt against the whole torrent. He takes a stand on a practical matter. He takes action against some abuse. What does this accomplish? Everything. How many people are there in your town? Well, every one of them gets a thrill that strikes deeper than any sermon he ever heard. He may howl, but he hears. The grocer’s boy, for the first time in his life, believes that the whole outfit of morality has any place in the practical world. Every class contributes its comment. Next year a new element comes forward in politics, as if the franchise had been extended. Remember this: you cannot, though you owned the world, do any good in it except by devising new ways of manifesting the fact that you felt in a particular way. It is the personal influence of example that is the power. Nothing else counts. You can do harm by other methods, but not good. This influence is a natural force, and works like steam power. Why all this commotion over your protest? If you accuse the mayor of being a thief, why does he not reply, in the words of modern philosophy, “Of course I’m a thief, I’m made that way”? Instead of that he resents it, and there ensues a discussion that takes people’s attention off of trade, and qualifies the atmosphere of the place. You have appreciably relieved the tension and checked the plague.

This whole subject must be looked at as a crusade in the cause of humanity. You are making it easier for every young man in town to earn his livelihood without paying out his soul and conscience. You cannot help any one man. You are forced into helping them all at once. Every time a man asserts himself he cuts a cord that is strangling somebody. The first time that independent candidates for local office were run in New York City, strong men cried in the street for rage. The supremacy of commerce had been affronted. New York, in all that makes life worth living, is a new city since the reform movements began to break up the torpor of serfdom.

You asked how to fight force. It must be fought with force, and not with arguments. Indeed, it is easier to start a reform and carry it through, than it is to explain either why or how it is done. You can only understand this after you have been three times ridiculed as a reformer; and then you will begin to see that throughout the community, running through every one, there are currents of beneficent power that accomplish changes, sometimes visible, sometimes hard to see; that this power is in its nature quite as strong, quite as real and reliable, as that Wall Street current,--terrible forces both of them, forever operative and struggling and contending together as they surge and swell through the people. It is the sight of that power for good that you need. I cannot give it to you. You must sink your own shaft for it. It is this beneficent current passing from man to man that makes the unity of all efforts for public betterment. You have a movement and an excitement over bad water, and it leaves you with kindergartens in your schools. It is this current that turns your remark at the club (which every one repeated in order to injure you) into a piece of encouragement to the banker’s clerk, who could not have made it himself except at the cost of his livelihood. It is this current--not only the fear of it, but the presence of it--in the heart of your merchants that leaves them at your mercy. Cast anything into this current and it goes everywhere, like aniline dye put into a reservoir; it tinges the whole local life in twenty-four hours. It is to this current that all appeals are made. All party platforms, all resolutions, all lies are dedicated to it; all literature lives by it. The head of power is near and easy if you strike directly for it.

There is an opinion abroad that good politics requires that every man should give his whole time to politics. This is another of the superstitions disseminated by the politicians who want us to go to their primaries, and accepted by people so ignorant of life that they believe that the temperature depends upon the thermometer.

Why, you are running those primaries now. If you were different, they would become different. You need never go near them. Go into that camp where your instinct leads you. The improvement in politics will not be marked by any cyclonic overturn. There will always be two parties competing for your vote. It takes no more time to vote for a good man than for a bad man. There will be no more men in public life then than now. There will be no overt change in conditions. A few leaders will stand for the new forces. It is true that it requires a general increase of interest on the part of every one, in order that these men shall be found. Your personal duty is to support them in private and public. That is all. The extent to which you yourself become involved in public affairs depends upon chances with which you need not concern yourself. Only try to understand what is happening under your eyes. Every time you see a group of men advancing some cause that seems sensible, and being denounced on all hands as “self-appointed,” see if it was not something in yourself, after all, that appointed those men.

As we grow old, what have we to rely on as a touchstone for the times? You once had your own causes and enthusiasms, but you cannot understand these new ones. You had your certificate from the Almighty, but these fellows are “self-appointed.” What you wanted was clear, but these men want something unattainable, something that society, as you know it, cannot supply. Calm yourself, my friend; perhaps they bring it.

Has the great Philosophy of Evolution done nothing for the mind of man, that new developments, as they arrive, are received with the same stony solemnity, are greeted with the same phrases as ever? How can you have the ingenuousness to argue soberly against me, supplying me, by every word you say, with new illustrations, new hope, new fuel? Until I heard you repeat word by word the prayer-book of crumbling conservatism, I was not sure I was right. You have placed the great seal of the world upon new truth. Thus should it be received.

The radicals are really always saying the same thing. They do not change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality, want of humor, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearance nobody follows them, yet every one believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honored pitch is G flat. The community cannot get that A out of its head. Nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone so long as the real A is kept sounding. Every now and then the whole town strikes it for a week, and all the bells ring, and then all sinks to suppressed discord and denial.

The reason why we have not, of late years, had strong consistent centres of influence, focuses of steady political power, has been that the community has not developed men who could hold the note. It was only when the note made a temporary concord with some heavy political scheme that the reform leaders could hear it themselves. For the rest of the time it threw the whole civilization out of tune. The terrible clash of interests drowned it. The reformers themselves lost it, and wandered up and down, guessing.

It is imagined that nature goes by jumps, and that a whole community can suddenly sing in tune, after it has been caterwauling and murdering the scale for twenty years. The truth is, we ought to thank God when any man or body of men make the discovery that there is such a thing as absolute pitch, or absolute honesty, or absolute personal and intellectual integrity. A few years of this spirit will identify certain men with the fundamental idea that truth is stronger than consequences, and these men will become the most serious force and the only truly political force in their community. Their ambition is illimitable, for you cannot set bounds to personal influence. But it is an ambition that cannot be abused. A departure from their own course will ruin any one of them in a night, and undo twenty years of service.

It would be natural that such sets of men should arise all over the country, men who “wanted” nothing, and should reveal the inverse position of the Boss System; a set of moral bosses with no organizations, no politics; men thrown into prominence by the operation of all the forces of human nature now suppressed, and the suppression of those now operative. It is obvious that one such man will suffice for a town. In the competition of character, one man will be naturally fixed upon, whom his competitors will be the first to honor; and upon him will be condensed the public feeling, the confidence of the community. If the extreme case do not arise, nevertheless it is certain that the tendencies toward a destruction of the present system, will reveal themselves as a tendency making for the weight of personal character in practical politics.

Reform politics is, after all, a simple thing. It demands no great attainments. You can play the game in the dark. A child can understand it. There are no subtleties nor obscurities, no higher analysis or mystery of any sort. If you want a compass at any moment in the midst of some difficult situation, you have only to say to yourself, “Life is larger than this little imbroglio. I shall follow my instinct.” As you say this, your compass swings true. You may be surprised to find what course it points to. But what it tells you to do will be practical agitation.

III

THE MASSES

Let us examine current beliefs on popular education, and then thereafter let us look very closely at the work done among the poor, and see upon what lines it has been found possible to establish influence.

Why is it that if you go down to the Bowery and set up a kindergarten or give a course of lectures on the Duties of Citizenship, every one commends you; whereas if you go into some abandoned district where a Tammany thug is running for the State Assembly against a Republican heeler, and if you put an honest man in the field against them both, your friends call you a fool, and say that your reform consists of mere negation?

Who asks to see the results upon the public welfare of a night school in astronomy? Yet, if you get ten mechanics to labor for six months with the fire of enthusiasm in them, building up a radical club, and as a result, one hundred and fifty men cast for the first time in their lives a vote that represents the heart and conscience of each, your intelligent friends ask, “What have you done? You are howling against the moon.”

Why is it that if you are a grocer and refuse to sand your sugar, you are called honest? Yet, if a young politician takes this course, it is supposed that life is not long enough for the world to discover his value; he is a visionary. In the sugar trade, the man insisted upon dealing with the community as a whole. He was not trying to sell sugar to a club, or to benefit some district. He dealt with the public. Now, if a politician deals directly with the public, we condemn him because we cannot see the empire of confidence he is building up. The reason we do not see it is entirely due to historical causes. We have had little experience recently in the utility of large appeals. We forget their power. Yet we are not without examples. Grover Cleveland dealt directly with the people on a great scale. He established a personal relation that was stronger than party bonds. This made him President, preserved his character and gave reality to politics. It was a bit of education to every man in the United States to see what riff-raff our political arks were made of: a man laid his hand on the end of one of them and tore off the roof.

We are rather more familiar with the power of public confidence as seen in times of revolution. In the year of the Lexow investigation the people of New York City believed that Dr. Parkhurst and John Goff were in earnest. There was a period of a few weeks when Goff exercised the powers of a dictator. The Police Commissioners had threatened to discipline a subordinate who had testified before Goff’s committee. He subpoenaed them all the next morning, and he browbeat them like school-boys. They went back humbled. The revelations of the summer had awakened the spirit of revolt in the masses of the people, and it expressed itself directly as power. The machinery of government was not in abeyance, but it was seen to be a mere vehicle. It could be made to work justice. Here were two men, Goff and Parkhurst, rendered all-powerful by the existence of popular confidence. The state of mind of the community was unusual, and the indignation soon subsided; but it subsided to a new level, and the abuses and inhumanity of Boss tyranny have never since been so severe in New York.

Our people have seen several volcanic eruptions of this sort, and therefore they believe in them. They believe in the moral power of the community, but are afraid it can only act by convulsion. They think that some new principle comes into play at such times, something which is not a constant factor in daily government. On the other hand, we have all been trained to respect plodding methods in common education, and we know that much can be done by kindergartens, boys’ clubs, and propaganda to change the standards of the community and make men trust virtue. We believe in the boys’ club, and we believe in the earthquake; we forget that the same principle underlies them both. When some one applies this principle to the field of political education that lies between them, we are cynical because we have no experience.

Apart from the lack of experience that prevents people from seeing the use of this practical activity, there are two distressing elements that make men not want to see it. In the first place, even if you work in the Bowery and a friend votes in Harlem, you are apt to be hitting his interests and prejudices. And in the second place your conduct is a horrid appeal. If this work is useful, he ought to be doing it. He had hoped that nothing could be done.

The real distinction between this particular sort of work and other philanthropy is, that other philanthropy is preparatory drill; this is war. The other is feeding, training, and preaching; this is practice. Now, you may have your license to preach all you please in the vineyard, but if you touch the soil with the spade, you find the ground is pre-empted; you are fighting a railroad. And this condition is openly recognized in cities where the evil forces are completely dominant.

In lecturing before the University Extension in Pennsylvania, you are not allowed to talk politics. It is against the policy of the philanthropists who run the institution, and who are run by the railroad. The situation in Philadelphia is merely illustrative of the distinction between philanthropy and political reform, which is always ready to become apparent. Of course, so long as the railroad distributes the philanthropy, there will result nothing but tyranny. The Roman Emperors gave shows to amuse the people, and we give them talks on Botticelli and magic-lantern pictures of the Nile. There are, then, real reasons why our people are slow to acknowledge the utility of militant political reform, and why they clutch at any handle against it.

But we have much more to learn from the philanthropists by a study of what they have done than by dwelling on their shortcomings. They have labored while the political reformers have slept; and after many trials and many failures they have found certain working principles.

It was they who discovered that we cannot, as human nature is constituted, give strength to any one except by helping the whole man to develop at once. We must give him a chance to grow. The workers among the poor have long ago seen the futility of any effort except that of raising the general standards of living. They have established Settlements, where the relation between the settlers and the surrounding population is as natural as family life and as perennial as Tammany Hall. After ten years of experiment this has been done in many places. If you will go to one of these places and study exactly what has happened in the line of benefit to the people, you will see that it has resulted _wholly_ from personal influence,--that is to say, from the effect of character upon character. “Two years ago we established a boys’ club, and soon afterwards a kindergarten. The boys returned one day, and out of jealousy smashed everything belonging to the kindergarten, and piled the rubbish in the middle of the room. Last week a barrel of fruit was sent here for the sick and weakly, and we left the barrel open with a card on the outside to that effect. You could not get the boys to touch the fruit. Now, if you ask me what system or what part of the system has caused the change in these boys, I don’t know.”

This is reform politics, but unless you and I go there and make a place for these boys in practical politics, they will find waiting for them nothing but the caucus and the job. They will relapse and forget. It is throwing effort into the sea to train the young if you stop there. The test comes when the scaffoldings of early life are taken down. Each man meets the world alone. The tragedies of character occur at this period. We must make a camp and standing ground for grown men. So far as the hope of political purity goes, there are acres of this city that are in a worse condition than health was in before the era of hospitals. Fly over them as the crow flies, and you cannot find a centre of downright antagonism to evil. The population does not know that such a thing exists; and yet, if you propose to go there and set up a fight against both parties,--that is to say, a fight against wickedness,--you are told by patriots and doctors of divinity, “Don’t do it unless you can win. You will disgust people with reform.”

It is awful and at the same time ludicrous to hear an educated person maintain this doctrine and in the same breath mourn over the corruption of the masses. The man throws his own dark shadow over them and bewails their want of light. He doubts the power of personal influence; and yet there is absolutely no other force for good in the world, and never has been. Let us stick to facts. Take individual cases of improvement and see what power has been at work. You will find that you disclose behind any personal improvement, not a ballot law or an organization, but a human being.

The movement for political reform goes into the Bowery in the wake of the philanthropists. We go there knowing something about practical politics. We know, for instance, that the Bowery is the geographical name for a district which is really governed by the same forces as Fifth Avenue. To think that the politics of the Bowery are controlled by the Bowery is about as sensible as to believe that the politics of Irkutsk are controlled at Irkutsk. We have got, first, to disclose the machinery of evil and then to fight it wherever we find it, even though it lead us into churches. Nothing is needed in any Tammany club on the Bowery that is not needed ten times as much in the Union League Club on Fifth Avenue--personal self-sacrifice for principle in a cause which is apparently hopeless. Unless you go there displaying that, you are not needed.

Our intercourse with the laboring man is a great teacher to ourselves. That is its main use. It brings out, as nothing else can, the magnitude and perfection of the system, whose visible top and little flag we can always see, but whose dimensions and ramifications nothing but experiment can reveal; philosophy could not guess it.

Here is a laborer on the street railroad. In order to get work he must show a ticket from the party boss. It is his passport from the Czar, countersigned by the proper official; otherwise he gets no job. Here is a young notary whom you employ to carry about the certificate that puts an independent candidate in nomination. You try to get him to sign the thing himself and join your club. It is no use asking. His brother did it once and lost his place; so close is the scrutiny, so rapid the punishment. Examine the retail grocer, or the tobacconist, or the cobbler; go into particulars with him, and you will find that his unwillingness to join your movement does not spring so directly from his inability to see the point of it, as from fear of the direct and immediate consequences to himself.

We wanted to elevate the masses, but it turns out, as the philanthropists discerned long ago, that there are no masses in America, there are no masses in New York City. We can discover only individuals, who are each controlled by individual interests, by various and subtle considerations. These men are in chains to other men, who often live in other parts of the city.

The attorneys and merchants, the business world in fact, is found to be in league with abuse. The man who signs the laborer’s license to work reports twice a day to a big contractor who is director in a bank whose president owns the opera house and endowed the sailors’ home. He built the yacht club, is vestryman in the biggest church, and is revered by all men. The title-deeds and registry books of all visible wealth, show the names of his intimate friends. All we can do in the way of weakening the chains is to expose them; this cruelty is largely ignorance. The beneficiaries must be made to see the sources of their wealth. It is pre-occupation with business, not coldness of heart, that conceals the conditions. The American business man is a warm-hearted being. He does not even care for money, but for the game of business.

As matters now stand in America, we see this condition,--that it is for the immediate interest of the dominant class, namely, the politico-financial class, to keep the people as selfish as possible. We have examined the subtle strains of influence and prejudice by which this commercial interest has been extended, until, as a practical matter, it is almost impossible for a man to get word to the laboring classes that there exists such a thing as political morality. Some professional philanthropist always stands ready to prevent the signal of honesty from being raised; some set of Sunday citizens interposes to stop the unwise, inexpedient, foolhardy attempt to be independent of rascality.

And when you do succeed in reaching the mechanic, what can you do for him? Tell him to be a man, and strike off the shackles that bind him.

Here we are, as helpless before the poor as before the rich, facing both of them with the same query, “Can you not see that your own concession, call it poverty, or call it poverty of will, is one element of this oppression?”

The difference between the poor and the financial classes is one of spiritual complexity. The promoters are well-to-do because their minds have been able to grasp and utilize the complex forces made up of the minds of their simpler fellow-beings. And this astuteness leaves them less open to unselfish emotions than the laboring man. His nature is more intact. He is a more emotional and instinctive being. It is for this reason that moral reforms have come from the lower strata of society. The people have as much to lose as the bankers, but they are more ready to lose it.

The head of moral feeling in the community has got to grow strong enough to force the financier to take his clutch off the laboring man, before you can reach the laboring man. And yet labor itself will contribute more than its share towards this head of moral feeling; and therefore you must go among the laboring classes with your ideas and your propaganda. But beware lest you give him a stone for bread. You can do no more for a man because you call yourself a “politician” than if you were a mere philanthropist. A man’s standards of political thought are but a small fraction of his general standards, and unless your sense of truth is as sharp as a sword you had better not come near the laboring man.

The point here made is--and it is of great importance--that we candidly acknowledge at every instant the nature of our undertaking and the nature of our power, for in so far as we mistake them we weaken our practical utility.

It is not as the agent of any institution that you are here, but as the agent of conscience at the dictation of personal feeling. Do you need proof that you yourself draw all your power from sheer moral influence? Note what you do when you start your club. You go to the nearest well-to-do person and ask for money for rent. He gives it to you out of his fund of general benevolence. To whom do you really want to distribute this benevolence? To every one. You feel that by passing it on through a group and series of boys and young men you can benefit the whole country. You use them as a mere vehicle. You know that you can only help them by getting them to help others. Your appeal for clients then goes out to the whole district. Your club puts you in communication with every man in it. In teaching your club or in exhorting any mortal to good behavior, what method, what stimulus, do you use? Whether you know it or not, you are really drawing support from every one who is following the same principle, all over the city, all over the country, all over the world. Do you not ceaselessly appeal to the examples of Washington and Lincoln, to the books and conduct of men whose aims were your aims? Or take your own case. Why do you occupy yourself with this thing? This activity satisfies your demands upon life; nothing else does. You are the creature of a thousand influences, and if you begin to trace them you find that you are fulfilling the will of Toynbee, of John Stuart Mill, of Kant. You are a disciple of Tolstoi. You were inspired by William Lloyd Garrison. It is they, as much as you, who are doing this work. It is they who formulated the ideas and impressed them upon you. Your great friends are the founders of religions. Examine the actual persons who give you practical help. You will find Moses, you will find Christ behind them. What you are using is the world’s fund of unselfishness. It is necessary to employ the whole of it in order to accomplish anything, however small. As a practical matter, every one does employ the whole of it every time he even thinks of reform.

Now, just as we can trace the sources of our power in the great currents of human feeling that flow down to us out of the past; so we can foresee the accomplishments of that power in enlarging the lives of men who come after us. We are sinking the foundations of a new politics. You cannot always see every stone, but it has gone to its place. It is impossible to take a stand for what you think is a true theory without thereby becoming an integral factor for good in every man who hears of it. It is impossible to be that factor without taking that stand.

What is the nature of the good you can do to the laboring man? His mind analyzes you in a flash. If he is influenced by you, you may be sure that it is by something in you that you had not intended to give him. After the man has seen you, he has been moved by you; but how? Consult your own remembrance. What incident of character impressed you most when you were a child? Do you remember any act, any expression or gesture or anecdote or speech, that had a lasting influence upon you? Now I ask you this: Was it done for you? Were you the designed beneficiary of it? Was it not rather the silent part of some one else’s conduct, a thing you were perhaps not meant to see at all? And this was no accident. This is the natural history of influence; it passes unconsciously from life to life.

We must take the world as we find it. We must deal with human nature according to the laws of human nature. Our politics are at present so artificial that the average man thinks that the name “politics” prevents the well established and familiar principles of human nature from being operative. But he is wrong. Man has never yet succeeded in inventing any system that could evade them or affect them in the least. All the political organization of reform is already in existence, and needs only strengthening and developing. It is all in use, and every one understands its use and knows its headquarters and its agencies. It is all individual character and courage, and with the growth of character and courage it will become more defined and visible every day.

IV

LITERATURE

There are feelings and views about life, there are conviction and insight, which come from thinking at a high rate of speed, and vanish when the machinery moves slowly and the blood ebbs. The world not only accepts the intensity of the writer, but demands it. Nevertheless, the world has an imperfect knowledge as to where this intensity comes from, how it is produced, or what relation it bears to ugliness and falsehood. “What a pleasure it must be to you,” said Rothschild to Heine, “to be able to turn off those little songs!”

In our ordinary moods we regard the conclusions of the poets as both true and untrue,--true to feeling, untrue to fact; true as intimations of the next world or of some lost world; untrue here, because detached from those portions of society that are perennially visible. Most men have a duplicate philosophy which enables them to love the arts and the wit of mankind, at the same time that they conveniently despise them. Life is ugly and necessary; art is beautiful and impossible. “The farther you go from the facts of life, the nearer you get to poetry. The practical problem is to keep them in separate spheres, and to enjoy both.” The hypothesis of a duplicity in the universe explains everything, and staves off all claims and questionings.

Such are the convictions of the average cultivated man. His back is broken, but he lives in the two halves comfortably enough. He has to be protected at his weak spot, of course, and that spot is the present; ten years from now, to-morrow, yesterday, the day of judgment, the State of Pennsylvania,--all these you are welcome to. Every form of idealism appeals to him, so long as it does not ask him to budge out of his armchair. “Aha,” he says, “I understand this. It takes its place in the realm of the Imagination.”

This man does not know, and has no means of knowing, that good books are only written by men whose backs are not broken, and whose vital energy circulates through their entire system in one sweep. They have a unitary and not a duplicate philosophy. The present is their strong point. The actualities of life are their passion. They lay a bold hand upon everything within their reach, for they see it with new sight.