Part 25

We are rightly getting to estimate the value of a man in our time in terms of what he accomplishes for others much more than for himself. Almost any one who devotes himself with sufficient exclusiveness to the business of helping himself will make a success of it, though some may doubt of the value of that success. What is difficult above all in our time, when the spirit of individualism is so rampant, is to make a success of helpfulness for others while making life flow on with reasonable smoothness for one's self. I do not hope to be able to impart to you the precious secret of how surely to do this, but something that I may say may be helpful to you in leading a larger than a mere selfish life, so that when the end shall come, as come it must, though one would never suspect it from the ways of men, the world will be a little better at least because you have lived.

Education has become the fetish of the day and the shibboleth by which the Philistine is recognized from the chosen people of culture and refinement. Popular education has become the {406} watchword of the time, and all things are fondly hoped for and confidently promised in its name. We are somewhat in doubt as to the mode of education that will be surely effective for all good and we are not quite certain as to how the results are exactly to be obtained, but education is to make the world better; to get rid gradually, yet inevitably, of the evil that is in it; to lift men up to the higher plane of knowledge where selfishness is at least not supposed to exist, or surely to be greatly minimized, where crime, of course, shall disappear, and where even the minor evils so hide their diminished heads that the millennium can not be far distant. It is true that some of these glorious promises seem long in fulfilment to those who are a little sceptical of the influence of particular forms of education that are now popular, but, of course, the response to that is, that so far we have not had the time to have the full benefit of education exert itself.

At the end of the eighteenth century the Encyclopedists in France, in their great campaign for the diffusion of information among the people and the spread of what they were pleased to call education, though some of us are prone to think that they hopelessly confused the distinction between education for power and education for information, confidently promised that when men knew enough, poverty, of course, would disappear and in its train would go all the attendant evils, {407} vice and crime and immorality, and with them, of course, unhappiness would disappear from the world. That is considerably over a century now, but we have not found it advisable as yet to do away with courts of law, nor jails, nor policemen, nor any of the mechanism of the law for the suppression of crime and immorality. Indeed, there are those who are unkind enough to say, that we now have to make use of more means than ever in proportion to the population for the suppression of vice and crime, and that they are more emphatically demanded even than at the time of the Encyclopedists. As for unhappiness and poverty, recent investigations in our large cities show so large a proportion of people willing yet unable to obtain a decent living wage, that it is quite startling. Our insane asylums are growing much more rapidly than the population, and not a few of the inmates are there because of immorality. Suicide is on the increase faster than the population and unfortunately the greatest increase is noted in the younger years. It is between fifteen and twenty-five that suicides are multiplying.

Of course the answer to this is, that education is not as yet carried to that extent among the great mass of people which would enable it to have its full beneficial effects. Our common school education is not enough to bring people under the beneficent influence of this great civilizing factor for the development of mankind. {408} Educators would urge that it is the higher education which serves to obliterate the ills that human flesh is heir to, moral as well as physical, as far, of course, as that is possible in so imperfect a world as this. If we could but extend the advantages of the higher education, of college and university training to the majority of the people, then say the advocates of education as a panacea for human ills, we would surely have that approach to the millennium which intellectual development by the diffusion of information can and must give.

It is worth while analyzing that proposition a little and applying it to present-day conditions as we know them. After all we have been turning out a large number of those who have had the benefit of the higher education from our colleges and universities during the last generation or so. They have gone out by the thousand to influence their fellows and presumably to be shining lights for profound improvement of life, striking examples that surely will prove an incentive and a source of emulation to others to do the right, avoid the wrong, be helpful instead of selfish and, in general, show the world how much education means for the happiness of all. There is a slang expression familiar in New York just now that you in New England may not know, for I understand that even the owls near Boston do not say "to-whit-to-whoo" but "to-whit-to-whoom," that may be quoted here: "Some men are born good, {409} some make good and some are caught with the goods on them." Not all of the graduates of colleges and universities were born good, of course. I wonder what we shall find with regard to the other two phases of existence. There are not a few who are critically perverse enough to say that, while many have made good, too many have been caught with the goods on them.

Let us take the subject that is so strikingly brought before us in our everyday life in recent years, the question of political corruption. Of course it is to be presumed that it is the non-college men who are both corruptors and corrupted. It is, of course, just as confidently to be presumed, on the other hand, that it is the college men who are the forerunners in all the exposures of recent years. Alas! for human nature, it is just the contrary. The leaders in big corruption, the mainstays of what has come to be called "big political business," have nearly all been college men. This has been true in California, in Missouri, in Pennsylvania, in New York, in Illinois. It would be easy to add other states, but I am only mentioning those where investigations are not yet forgotten, though we American people have cultivated a really marvellous power of forgetting. The states are sufficiently far apart from one another to make it very clear that the condition is not limited to a particular locality but is practically universal. In recent years we have been getting closer to the {410} man higher up. In a great many of the cases, I should say in a majority of them, he has proved to be a university man, and if not, then university men have been his right hands in the accomplishment of evil. The boards of directors of corporations, life insurance, fire insurance, railroads, great industries and manufactures, even banks, who have known that laws were being violated and who have not cared because it was money in their pockets, have in many cases, perhaps even in the majority of cases, been college men. Certainly college graduates have not proved to be the little leaven that would leaven the whole mass for righteousness.

In the even more dangerous evils of our time that have risked the very existence of democratic government, in the imposition on the people by the privileged classes of indirect taxes and tariffs that make life hard for the poor, but add largely to the wealth of the rich, college men have only too often been the active agents. Without their active co-operation certainly these crying injustices to the poor would never have been accomplished. They have often been adding useless millions to useless millions simply for the game; not caring how much the poor had to suffer. They have been accumulating at the expense of the working classes what Governor Hughes of New York so well called, not long since, a corruption fund for their children. They have been the prime factors in many agencies {411} for evil and they have not been the guardians of the rights of others, the weaker ones, that we have a right to expect of them. In the awful evils that have been exposed as a consequence of the fellow-servant doctrine and the contributory negligence principle at law, which have been the root of so much suffering in the world, college men have not helped to point out evils and organized for the solution of them, though they have been closely in contact with all the problems of them as judges, lawyers, directors of railroad companies, and industrial concerns. In general, while they have been in a position to know and alleviate some of the worst ills of our social system, they have done very little. They helped to bind fetters. It is men of much lower social station and education who have awakened us.

The investigations of recent years as to the condition of wage-earners have shown us many unfortunate evils. It was known that one in four of the population in London was living in dire poverty and this was thought to be due to the special circumstances in London. An investigation of York in England showed, however, that smaller towns, even cathedral towns, that were supposed to be almost without poverty, were hot-beds of it and were nearly as bad as London. Then, we took the flattering unction to our souls that these were altogether foreign conditions. Such investigations as we could make in New York, however, showed that we were little if any {412} better than the reports from England and Germany revealed abroad. Then it was said that the large city, that brood-oven of vice and misery, was responsible. Pittsburg, for instance, set up the claim that while great fortunes were made there the workmen were paid better wages than any place else in the world. Alas for the fallibility of human judgment in social affairs! The Pittsburg Survey was made and it was found that while a few of the better-class workmen were paid very well, the great mass of the workmen were awfully underpaid, and it was impossible for the majority of them to live decently on what they received. Further investigations into industrial conditions have only emphasized the conclusions obtained from the Survey.

Human life has become very cheap in this country. A prominent clergyman said not very long ago that it was safer to be a murderer in the United States than a brakeman. The expression is true if the proportion of brakemen who lose their lives to murderers who lose theirs in this country is taken. We are careless of the lives of the honest workman, and sentimentally over-careful of the lives and comfort of the criminal. Every now and then there are inevitable reactions against this laxity of the law, and as a consequence, while Canada has no lynchings and there are none in England, while peoples of our stock have no need to appeal to force, we lynch many more than we execute in this {413} country. The leaders of many of the mobs, as the directors of the industrial companies who knowingly allow the waste of life to go on, have had the benefit of our American education, such as it is. Educated people are responsible for things that are and unless they meet their responsibilities there will be no improvement.

Some of these abuses have risen to a climax. Not long ago a story was told that illustrates, as it seems to me, some present-day feelings very well. A great steel company having a contract for a bridge in the Far East, was rushing the last steel beams for the completion of the contract. America is noted for its marvellous power to do work rapidly that other countries take time for. There was a heavy penalty attached if they did not complete the contract on time. A fast steamer was waiting in New York harbor all ready to take this last consignment out with it. A special train was standing in the yards of the steel plant, to be rushed to New York just as soon as the beams were completed. In the midst of all the hurry and bustle a workman got his foot caught in the huge crane which transports the immense beams from one portion of the plant to the other. An examination of the manner in which he was caught showed clearly that he could not be released without taking the crane apart. That would mean that thirty-six hours would have to be spent in the mechanical handling of that crane. If that were done it would be {414} quite impossible to make the shipment on time, so closely was the period of completion calculated. Not only was there a heavy money penalty, but there would be a decided loss of American prestige.

The workman who was caught was only a foreigner. He was only getting $1.25 a day. Just one thing was to be done evidently, because that steamer had to sail on time and that freight train had to get out the next morning. The other foreign workmen were put out of the shops, only the confidential men were left, an ambulance was summoned; as it appeared in sight the crane was run over the portion of the foot that was caught, the man was removed to the care of the surgeon, his wound was dressed at the hospital, the contract was completed on time and American enterprise and power to do things faster than all the world was vindicated.

We are making money. In the meantime the directors of companies under whom such things are done are mainly college men. Whether they feel it or not they are personally responsible for everything that happens in their business, for it is their business by which human life is sacrificed or human suffering increased, or human morality deteriorated. Probably the majority of the stockholders in the companies are college men. Some of them are college women. They are deriving incomes from forms of injustice, from conditions that cause human suffering that {415} might be avoided. They are, whether they know it or not, committing one of the crimes that calls to heaven for vengeance--defrauding laborers of their wages; because to pay a man less than a decent living wage is to defraud that laborer of his wages. No man has a right to go into the labor market and buy labor as cheaply as he can. Men must live, they must support their families, and to compel them to take less than a decent living wage is to hold them in slavery. Every man who derives an income from such sources must know whether there is injustice at work or not in whatever he benefits by. It is easy to plead ignorance, but the ignorance is no justification. When we take money from something we must know that that money has no taint of injustice about it. There is a startling passage in the Scriptures that I have often thought should be repeated more frequently in our time. It is, "From the sins we know not of, O Lord deliver us."

There are many things that are done for the educated rich in our time, things that are full of injustice, yet from which the rich derive great benefits for which they will be held responsible. I cannot see it else. We hear much in our time of the stewardship of wealth, of the fact that if a man has much more money than others he is bound thereby to do more good with it, just inasmuch as he has superfluous means must he accomplish not only actually more but {416} proportionately more than those who are less wealthy around him. What is true thus of material wealth is even truer of intellectual wealth. The man who has more education than his neighbors is bound thereby to be helpful to his neighbors, to uplift them--how much one hesitates to use that much-abused word,--to help solve their problems, to make life happier for them; he is bound to use his faculties, God-given as they are and developed by intellectual opportunities, not for himself alone, but for all those around him.

Unfortunately recent generations of college men have not taken this responsibility seriously, or have not seen the duty that lay before them and the burden imposed on them by the very necessity of conditions. As a consequence they have often been leaders in evil. They have almost invariably been protagonists of selfishness and of individualism. So long as they have gotten much out of life they have not cared whether others have had the paths for even reasonable happiness and some opportunities in life made smooth. Only too often they have been a stumbling block in the road for others less educated than they. They have been the men higher up, the bribers who are ever so much worse than the bribed, the company directors who have turned aside and seen evil and injustice and pretended in smug propriety that it was no affair of theirs, or perhaps have said in self-justification--and such self-justification!--that if they did not do it {417} others would; the wealthy men who have used every means to get around the law to oppress the poor, to add useless wealth to useless wealth at the cost of others, even at the risk of subverting liberty, overturning government and ruining this latest experiment in democracy. I am not a muckraker, but we cannot hide from ourselves and we must not miss the real meaning of the events in the life around us as it really is.

When I think of the situation I am prone to compare with it other generations of college men and what they accomplished. History is not worth while if it tells us only of the past. It is of no more value than any other story, real or fictitious. History is significant only when the lessons of the past are valuable to the present. We are prone to think of education as influencing deeply only recent generations. Let me try and tell you briefly the story of some generations of college men who accomplished things that it will be worth while for us to consider to-day.

When the universities came into existence in the early thirteenth century social conditions were about as bad as can well be imagined. The incursions of the Goths had rubbed out all the old Roman law and the customs of the various nations had been obliterated in the disorder of the migration of the nations, when might absolutely made right. Gradually out of the inevitable lawlessness of the Dark Ages the Church, by her beneficent influence, brought the beginnings of {418} law and order so far as barbarous peoples could be lifted up. In the sixth century there was nearly everywhere in Europe social chaos. During the next centuries came the gradual uplift. Christianity in Ireland did much even in the preceding century, and then helped in the regeneration of Europe in the succeeding centuries. Charlemagne helped greatly, as his name chronicles, and Alfred, well deserving of the name the Great, carried on his work. In the tenth century everywhere the dawn of better things was to be seen. In the eleventh century organization of civil rights begins to make itself felt; in the twelfth century the universities were coming into existence; and then with the thirteenth century there was a great rejuvenescence of humanity in every department, but, above all, in the social order. Under feudalism men had no rights of themselves except such as were conferred on them by some external agency. In the thirteenth century the essential rights of man begin to make themselves felt and find confident assertion.

It is not hard to trace the steps of the development. Magna Charta was signed in 1215. The First English Parliament met in 1257. The representative nature of that parliament became complete in the next twenty years. The English Common Law was put into form about the beginning of the last quarter of the century and in 1282 Bracton published his great digest of it. The principle there shall be no taxation without {419} representation, our own basis for the Declaration of Independence five centuries later, was proclaimed as early as 1260 and was emphasized by the great Pope Boniface VIII at the end of the century. Early in the century, the great Lateran Council decreed that every diocese in the world should have a college and that the Metropolitan Sees at least should have such opportunities for post-graduate study as we now call universities. The first great Pope of the century, Innocent III, laid the foundation of a great City Hospital in Rome and required that every bishop throughout the world should have one in his See and that the model of it should be that of the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. Leprosy was an epidemic disease among the people, somewhat as tuberculosis is now; measures were taken for the segregation of lepers, leper hospitals were built for them outside of the town, and these great generations solved a problem in hygiene as difficult as is ours with regard to tuberculosis.

Above all, the rights of the people were assured to them. At the beginning of the century probably the most striking thing among the population of the various towns, if a modern had a chance to visit them, would be the number of the maimed and the halt and the blind. We would be apt to wonder where were the industrial and manufacturing plants responsible for all this maiming of the people, and look in vain for the belching chimneys of factories or trains. It was {420} another form of selfishness that produced cripples in the twelfth century. Punishment was by maiming. For offences against property a man lost an eye, or a hand, or a leg. Very often the offences were of a kind that we would resent punishment for in the modern time. If a man were caught poaching on a nobleman's preserves of game, and sometimes it was the hunger of his children that drove him to it, he lost a hand. For a second offence, he lost an eye. For failures to pay various taxes, if the offence were repeated, maiming was likely to be the consequence. All this was in as perfect accordance with law as our fellow-servant or contributory-negligence doctrines. So that the sight of the maimed person might deter others from following this example of recalcitrancy, it was hoped that these cripples would not die, though in the imperfect surgery of the time they often did. Always the selfish pleasures of the upper classes so-called, when they are thoughtless, mean the loss of all possibilities of happiness for the lower classes. The ways of it all may be different from age to age, the results and the responsibility are always the same.