Part 10

It was a campaign in which were discussed most of the fundamental problems of social life. A stranger, coming to Toledo at that time, might have thought us a most unsophisticated people, for there were speculations about the right of society to inflict punishment, the basis of property, and a rather searching inquiry into the subject of representative government. This was involved in the dispute as to the propriety of political machines, for the Republicans by that time had a party organization so strong that it was easily denominated a machine; it was so strong that it controlled every branch of the city government except the executive; it never could defeat Jones. There was a good deal said, too, about the enforcement of law, a subject which has its fascination for the people of my town.

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Besides these interesting topics there was the subject of municipal home rule. This had already become vital in Toledo because, a year or so before, the Republican party organization through its influence in the state, without having to strain its powers of persuasion, had induced the legislature to pass a special law which deprived the Mayor of Toledo of his control of the police force and vested the government of that body in a commission appointed by the governor of the state.

It had been, of course, a direct offense to Jones, and it was intended to take from him the last of his powers. He had been greatly roused by it; the morning after the law had been enacted he had appeared at my house before breakfast to discuss this latest assault upon liberty. The law was an exact replica of a law that had been passed for Cincinnati many years before, and that law had been sustained by the Supreme Court in a decision which had made it the leading case on that subject of constitutional law for a whole generation. Time and again it had been attacked and always it had been sustained; to contest the constitutionality of this new act seemed the veriest folly.

But Jones was determined to resist; like some stout burgomaster of an old free city of Germany he determined to stand out against the city’s overlords from the rural districts, and he insisted on my representing him in the litigation which his resistance would certainly provoke. I had no hope of winning, and told him so; I explained the precedent in the Cincinnati case, and that only made him more determined; if there was one thing more than another for which he had a supreme and sovereign contempt it was a legal precedent. My brethren at the bar all laughed at me, as I knew they would; but I went to work, and after a few days’ investigation became convinced that the doctrine laid down in that leading case was not at all sound.

When I came to this conviction, I induced Jones to retain additional counsel, one of the most brilliant lawyers at our bar, Mr. Clarence Brown, a man who, in addition to his knowledge of the law, could bring to the forum a charming personality, a wit and an eloquence that were irresistible. He, too, set to work, and in a few days he was convinced, as I, that the precedent should be overthrown. Jones refused to turn over the command of the police to the new commissioners whom the governor appointed; they applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus, we tried the case, and we won, overthrowing not only the doctrine at the Cincinnati case, but the whole fabric of municipal legislation in the state, so that a special session of the legislature was necessary to enact new codes for the government of the cities.

Our satisfaction and our pride in our legal achievement was somewhat modified by the fact that the application of the same rule to conditions in our sister city of Cleveland had the effect, in certain cases then pending, of pulling down the work which another great mayor, Tom L. Johnson, was then doing in that city. It was even said that the Supreme Court had been influenced by the desire of Mark Hanna, Tom Johnson’s ancient enemy in Cleveland, to see his old rival defeated. Some were unkind enough to say that Mark Hanna’s influence was more powerful with the court, as at that time constituted, than was the logic of the attorneys who were representing Golden Rule Jones.

But however that may have been, the decision in that case had ultimate far-reaching effects in improving the conditions in Ohio cities, and was the beginning of a conflict that did not end until they were free and autonomous. In my own case it was the beginning of a study of municipal government that has grown more fascinating as the years have fled, a study that has led me to see, or to think that I see, the large hope of our democracy in the cities of America.

I regard it as Jones’s supreme contribution to the thought of his time that, by the mere force of his own original character and personality, he compelled a discussion of fundamental principles of government. Toledo to-day is a community which has a wider acquaintance with all the abstract principles of social relations than any other city in the land, or in the world, since, when one ventures into generalities, one might as well make them as sweeping as one can.

Jones’s other great contribution to the science of municipal government was that of non-partizanship in local affairs. That is the way he used to express it; what he meant was that the issues of national politics must not be permitted to obtrude themselves into municipal campaigns, and that what divisions there are should be confined to local issues. There is, of course, in our cities, as in our land or any land, only one issue, that which is presented by the conflict of the aristocratic, or plutocratic, spirit and the spirit of democracy.

Jones used to herald himself as “a Man Without a Party,” but he was a great democrat, the most fundamental I ever knew or imagined; he summed up in himself, as no other figure of our time since Lincoln, all that the democratic spirit is and hopes to be. Perhaps in this characterization I seem to behold his figure larger than it was in relation to the whole mass, but while his work may appear at first glance local, it was really general and universal. No one can estimate the peculiar and lively force of such a personality; certainly no one can presume to limit his influence, for such a spirit is illimitable and irresistible.

He was elected in that last campaign for the fourth time, but he did not live very long. He had never, it seemed to me, been quite the same after the day when he had that experience of insult which he did not resent. “Draw the sting,” he used to counsel us when, in our campaign harangues, we became bitter, or sarcastic, or merely smart. He had supreme reliance on the simple truth, on the power of reasonableness. He never reviled again; he never sought to even scores. When he died the only wounds he left in human hearts were because he was no more. They understood him at last, those who had scoffed and sneered and abused and vilified, and I, who had had the immense privilege of his friendship, and thought I knew him,--when I stood that July afternoon, on the veranda of his home, beside his bier to speak at his funeral, and looked out over the thousands who were gathered on the wide lawn before his home,--I realized that I, too, had not wholly understood him.

I know not how many thousands were there; they were standing on the lawns in a mass that extended across the street and into the yards on the farther side. Down to the corner, and into the side streets, they were packed, and they stood in long lines all the way out to the cemetery. In that crowd there were all sorts of that one sort he knew as humanity without distinction,--judges, and women of prominence and women whom he alone would have included in humanity, there were thieves, and prize-fighters,--and they all stood there with the tears streaming down their faces.

There is no monument to Golden Rule Jones in Toledo; and since St. Gaudens is gone I know of no one who could conceive him in marble or in bronze. There is not a public building which he erected, no reminder of him which the eye can see or the hands touch. But his name is spoken here a thousand times a day, and always with the reverence that marks the passage of a great man upon the earth. And I am sure that his influence did not end here. Did not a letter come from Yasnaya Polyana in the handwriting of the great Tolstoy, who somehow had heard of this noble and simple soul who was, in his own way, trying the same experiment of life which the great Russian was making?

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In the beginning, of course, it was inevitable that Jones should have been called a Socialist. I suppose he did not care much himself, but the Socialists cared, and promptly disowned him, and were at one with the capitalists in their hatred and abuse of him. He shared, no doubt, the Socialists’ great dream of an ordered society, though he would not have ordered it by any kind of force or compulsion, but in that spirit which they sneer at as mere sentimentalism. He was patient with them; he saw their point of view; he had, indeed, the immense advantage of being in advance of them in his development. He saw Socialism not, as most see it, from the hither side, but from the farther side, as one who has passed through it; he was like a man who having left the dusty highway and entered a wood which he thinks his journey’s end, suddenly emerges and from a hill beholds the illimitable prospect that lies beyond. Of course he could never endure anything so doctrinaire as Socialism, in the form in which he was accustomed to see it exemplified in the Socialists about him. He could not endure their orthodoxy, any more than he could endure the orthodoxy they were contending against. Their sectarianism was to him quite as impossible as that sectarianism he had known in other fields. Their bigotry was as bad as any. He saw no good to come from a substitution of their tyranny for any other of the many old tyrannies in the world. And naturally to one of his spirit the class hatred they were always inciting under the name of class consciousness was as abhorrent to him as all hatred was.

Sometimes the Socialists, with their passion for generalization, for labeling and pigeonholing everything in the universe, said he was an anarchist. The more charitable of them, wishing to sterilize the term and rid it of its sinister implication, but still insistently scientific, said he was a “philosophic” anarchist. That is a term too vague to use, though in one sense, I suppose, all good men are anarchists, in that they would live their lives as well without laws as with them. Jones himself would have scorned those classifications as readily as he would had anyone said he was a duke or an earl. “No title is higher than Man,” he wrote once in a little campaign song. And he was that--a Man.

He would not join any society or, as he said, “belong” to anything. I have thought so often of what he said to a book agent one day. We were just on the point of leaving the Mayor’s office for luncheon, and the individual who wishes “just a minute” was inevitably there, blocking the way out of the office. He was indubitably a book agent; anyone who has a rudimentary knowledge of human nature can identify them at once, but this one had as his insinuating disguise some position as a representative of a Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, and he was there to confer on the Mayor the honor of a membership in that society.

“And what books am I required to buy?” asked Jones.

“Well,” the agent said, “you are not required to buy any books, but, of course, a member of the association would naturally want Mr. Jefferson’s complete works.” Jones’s eyes were twinkling; “Mr.” Jefferson amused him immensely, of course.

“They are very popular,” the man went on, “many persons are buying them.”

“I don’t find the ideas in them very popular; certainly those in Mr. Jefferson’s greatest work are not popular; no one wants to see them adopted.”

“To which one of his works do you refer?” asked the agent.

“Why, the one that is best known,” said Jones, “its title is ‘The Declaration of Independence.’ I already have a copy of that.”

The poor fellow was conscious that his enterprise was not going very well, but he said, with a flourish of magnanimity:

“Oh, well, it’s immaterial to me whether you take the books or not, but of course you will wish to belong to the association?”

“But I already belong to the association in which Mr. Jefferson was chiefly interested,” said Jones.

“What is that, may I ask?” said the agent.

“The United States of America,” said Jones, “and as I am a member of that, I see no reason why I should join anything smaller.”

And then he laughed, and if there had been any uneasiness because of his gentle guying, it disappeared when he laid his hand on the agent’s shoulder and looked into his eyes in that spirit of friendliness which enveloped him like an aureole.

He had a conception of unity that was far beyond his contemporaries, a conception that will be beyond humanity for many years. It was that conception which enabled him to see through the vast superstition of war, and the superstition of partizanship, and all the other foolish credulities that have misled the people in all times.

One evening, it was just at dark, we were leaving the mayor’s office to walk home--we walked home together nearly every evening--and in the dusk a tramp, a negro, came up and asked him for the price of a night’s lodging. The Mayor fumbled in his pockets, but he had no small change, he had only a five-dollar bill, but he gave this to the tramp and said:

“Go get it changed, and bring it back.”

The tramp took it and disappeared, and we waited. Jones talked on about other things, but I was interested in the tramp; my expectation of his return was far more uncertain than Jones’s. But after a while the tramp did come back, and he poured out into the Mayor’s hand the change in silver coin. The Mayor complained humanly of the heavy silver which the Secretary of the Treasury always sends out to us, so that the new one-dollar bills may go to New York City, and tumbled the money into his trousers pocket.

“But ain’t you goin’ to count it?” asked the negro in surprise.

“Did you count it?” asked Jones.

“Yes, suh, I counted it.”

“Was it all there, wasn’t it all right?”

“Yes, suh.”

“Well, then, there’s no need for me to count it, is there?”

The negro looked in wide white-eyed surprise.

“Did you take out what you wanted?” asked the Mayor.

“No, suh, I didn’t take any.”

“Here, then,” said Jones, and he gave the man a half-dollar and went on.

There was no possible ostentation in this; it was perfectly natural; he was doing such things every hour of the day.

He had no need to stop there, in the dark, to impress me, his friend and intimate. I do him wrong even to stoop to explain so much. But I wonder how much good his confidence did that wandering outcast? How much good did it do to me? By the operation of the same law which brought that vagrant back to Jones’s side with all the money, I with my distrust, might have been treated far differently.

Or so, at least, it seems to me, and I tell this incident as one which proves the reverence Jones had for the great natural law of love. For the chief count in the indictment respectability brought against him was that he had no reverence for law. To see and hear them when they said this, one would have supposed that a council or legislature had never been corrupted in the land. It used to amuse Jones to reflect that his literal acceptance of the fundamental principle of Christianity should have been such a novel and unprecedented thing that it instantly marked him out from all the other Christians and made him famous in Christendom.

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I say famous, and perhaps I mean only notorious, for in the beginning many of his townsmen meant it as a reflection, and not a tribute. Some of them said it was but an advertising dodge, a bit of demagogism, but as Jones applied the rule to everybody, other explanations had soon to be adopted, and after he had employed it about the City Hall for two years the situation became so desperate that something had to be done. Controversy was provoked, and for almost a decade, Toledo presented the unique spectacle of a modern city in which this principle was discussed as though it were something newly discovered. Some seemed to think that Jones had invented it; they said it was absurd, that it really would not work. Of course most regarded it, as most now regard the Golden Rule, as a pretty sentiment merely, something for the children in Sunday-school. It is considered, of course, as any sophisticated person knows, as altogether impractical, and even silly and absurd.

To be sure, the clergymen were under some sort of professional necessity of treating it seriously, and they used to prepare profound papers, arranged in heads and subheads, with titles and subtitles, and after all the usual ostentatious preliminary examination of the grounds and the authorities, and with the appearance of academic fairness, in discussions that were formal, exact, redolent of the oil, bearing the hallmark of the schools, they would show that Jesus meant there were only certain exigencies in which, and certain persons to whom, this rule was to be applied. It was all very learned and impressive, but one was apt to develop a disturbing doubt as to whether one was of those to whom it was to be applied. It was certainly not to be applied to criminals, or perhaps even to politicians. It was not to be applied to poor people, or to the working people, unless they were in Sunday-school as conscious inferiors, in devout and penitent attitudes. And as these people were so seldom in church or Sunday-school, and as those who were there apparently needed no such consideration, these discourses left one rather uncertain as to what to do with the Golden Rule.

All men of course believe in the Golden Rule, or say they do, but they believe in it only “up to a certain point,” and with each individual this point differs; the moment in which to abandon the Rule and take to “the shotgun and the club” comes to some soon, to others late, and to some oftener than others; but to most, if not to all of us, it inevitably arrives. That is why, no doubt, the world is no farther along in the solution of the many distressing problems it has on its mind.

According to the standards of conduct and of “honor” inherited from the feudal ages, while personal violence may be conceded to be illegal, one is, nevertheless, still generally taught that it is wrong and unmanly not to resent an insult or an injury, by violence, if necessary,--fighting and killing, by individuals, states and nations, are thought to be not only honorable and worthy, but, in many cases, indispensable. Society has an obsession similar to that strange superstition of the feud, which affects the Kentucky mountaineers. Generally we are less afraid to fight than we are not to fight. Our system is based on force, our faith is placed in force, so that nearly all of the proposals of reform, for the correction of abuses, involve the use of violence in some form. We have erected a huge idol in the figure of the beadle, who, assisted by the constable, is to make society over, to make men “good.” Jones came upon the scene in America at a time when there was undoubtedly a new and really splendid impetus toward a better and higher conception of life and conduct, both in public and private. Yet even then no other thought seemed to possess the public mind than that someone should be put in prison and made to suffer.

Men did not and do not see what Jones saw so much more clearly than any other reformer of his time, namely that, above all the laws men make with their political machines in their legislatures, there is a higher law, and that the Golden Rule is a rule of conduct deduced from that law. He saw that men, whether they knew it or not, liked it or not, or were conscious of it or not, had in all times been living, and must forever go on living, under the principle on which the Golden Rule is based. That is, Jones saw that this great law had always existed in the universe, just as the law of gravitation existed before Newton discovered it. It is inherent in the very constitution of things, as one of that body of laws which govern the universe and always act and react equally among men. And Jones felt that men should for their comfort, if for no higher motive, respect this law and get the best out of life by observing it; and that it should be the business of men through their governments to seek out this law and the rules that might scientifically be deduced from it, instead of putting their faith in their own contrivances of statutes, resolutions, orders, and decrees, and, when these would not work, trying to make them effective through grand juries and petit juries, and all the hideous machinery of jails and prisons, and scaffolds and electric chairs. And because he had no superstitious reverence for policemen or their clubs, or for soldiers and their bayonets and machine guns, they said he had no reverence for law.

He had, of course, been to the legislature; he had seen the midnight sessions there, when statutes were enacted amid scenes of drunken riot and confusion, and he saw no reason why he should have reverence for the acts of these men. Perhaps he was wrong; I am only trying to tell how it appeared to him. He was not a lawyer, but he knew what many lawyers have never learned, that there is sometimes a vast difference between a statute and a law. He saw that not all statutes are laws; that they are laws only when, by accident or design, they are in conformity with those rules by which the universe is governed, whether in the physical or the spiritual world, and these laws, eternal and immutable, are invariable, self-executing, instant in operation, without judges to declare them, or executives to enforce them, or courts to say whether they are unconstitutional or not.

He saw that the law on which the Golden Rule is founded, the law of moral action and reaction, is the one most generally ignored. Its principle he felt to be always at work, so that men lived by it whether they wished to or not, whether they knew it or not. According to this law, hate breeds hate and love produces love in return; and all force begets resistance, and the result is the general disorder and anarchy in which we live so much of the time.

It may be that in this view of life some dangerous apothegms are involved; as we grow older we grow conservative, and conservatism is a kind of cynicism, a kind of fear, the trembling distrust of age. But I know that in the life concept to which Jones came in his study of this principle, every act of his life, no matter how trifling and insignificant it may have seemed, suddenly took on a vast and vital significance; so that the hasty glance, the unkind word, the very spirit in which a thing is said or done, were seen to have an effect which may reach farther than the imagination can go, an effect not only on one’s own life and character, but on the lives and characters of all those about him. He was always human; I say that to prevent any impression that he was solemn or priggish; he deliberately took up smoking, for instance, toward the end of his days, because, he said with a chuckle, one must have some vices. And sometimes when the Golden Rule seemed not to “work,” he would truly say it was only because he didn’t know how to work it. And he used to quote Walt Whitman:

The song is to the singer and comes back most to him;

* * * * *

The love is to the lover and comes back most to him; The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him--it cannot fail.

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