Part 16

It was, of course, useless to explain, since any statement I might make would be but one more welcome knot to the tangle of misrepresentation in which the unhappy incident was being so gladly snarled, and I tried to forget it, though that was impossible, since it provided the text for many a sanctimonious editorial in the land, in each one of which some addition was made to the original report. Herbert Spencer says somewhere that for every story told in the world there is some basis of truth, and I suppose he is right, but I have always felt that he did not, at least in my reading of him, sufficiently characterize that worst vice of the human mind, intellectual dishonesty. Perhaps if he had associated less with scientists and more with professional reformers of the morals of other persons he would not have omitted this curious specimen from his philosophic analysis, if he did omit it; and if that experience of the young civilian at Columbus had not been sufficient, I could have supplied him with another out of an episode in which I had borne a part some years before, one which should have been sufficient to warn me against the type for the rest of my life.

It concerns another young civilian, though this one was so old that he should have known better, and relates to a time years before when I happened to be running for the state senate. I say happened, for it was precisely of that fortuitous nature, since I had not been concerned in the circumstances which nominated me, so entirely negative in their character that I might as well have been said not to be running at all. I was a young lawyer, just beginning to practice, and in my wide leisure was out of town that summer, economically spending a holiday at my father’s house, and, since the Democrats had no hope in this world of carrying the district, and could get no one who was on the ground to defend himself to accept their nomination, they had nominated me. It was an honor, perhaps, but so empty and futile that when I came home again it seemed useless even to decline it, and best to forget it, and so I tried to do that, and made no campaign at all. But one afternoon I had a caller, a tall, dark visaged man, in black clerical garb, who came softly into my office, carefully closed the door, and, fixing his strange, intense eyes on me, said that he came to talk politics. He represented a reform league and he came, he said, to discuss my candidature for the state senate, and to offer me the support of his organization. “Of course,” he went on to explain, “we should impose certain conditions.” He fixed on me again and very intently, those strange, fanatic eyes.

I knew very well what the conditions were; it was hardly necessary for him to explain that I should be expected to sign a pledge to support the bills proposed by his organization, some of which, no doubt, were excellent measures.

I explained to him that I was under no illusions as to the campaign, that there was no possible chance of my election that year, that if there had been I never would have been nominated, and nothing short of a miracle could elect me. “But,” I added, “even if that miracle happens, though it will not, and I should be elected, I should go down to Columbus and to the Senate able to say that I had made no promises whatever.”

He looked at me a moment, with those strange, cold eyes peering narrowly out of his somber visage, and as he gazed they seemed to contract, and with the faint shadow of a smile that was wholly without humor, he said:

“Well, you can say that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

The smile raised the man’s cheeks a little higher until they enclosed the little eyes in minute wrinkles, and invested them with an expression of the deepest cunning.

“Why, since you are opposed to signing our pledge, we will waive that in your case, and you and I can have a little private understanding--no one need ever know, and you can say----” he was gently tapping the ends of his fingers together, and the last terms of his proposal seemed to be absorbed by an expression of vulpine significance so eloquent and plain in its meaning that mere words were superfluous.

I sat there and looked at him; I had known of him, he spoke nearly every Sunday in some church, and took up collections for the reform to which, quite sincerely, I believe, he was devoting his life. Then I said:

“But that isn’t my idea even of politics, to say nothing of ethics.”

I believe now that he had no conception of the moral significance of his suggestion that we have an implied understanding which I was to be at liberty to deny if the exigencies of politics suggested it. He was a reformer, belonging to the order of the indurated mind. He was possessed by a theory, which held his mind in the relentless mould of its absolutism, and there his mind had hardened, and, alas, his heart, too, no doubt--so that its original impressions were all fixed and immutable, and not subject to change; they could not be erased nor could any new impressions be superimposed. He was convinced that his particular theory was correct, and that if only it could be imposed on mankind, the world would be infinitely better off; and that hence any means, no matter what, were permissible in effecting this imposition, because of the good that would follow. It is an old mental attitude in this world, well treated of in books, and understood and recognized by everyone except those who adopt it, and in its spirit every new reform is promulgated by its avatar. But the reformer never thinks of himself in any such light, of course, he does not understand it any more than he understands mankind’s distrust of him. It is the instinctive fear of the theorist that has been felt for every one of them from Robespierre, the archtype, and impossibilist par excellence, down to the latest man haranguing his little idle crowd on the street corner.

XL

These observations come with the recollection of those days of my first term in the mayor’s office when I had so much to do with reformers that I earnestly desired that no one would ever include me in their category. They came to see me so often and in such numbers that my whole view of life was quite in danger of distortion. It seemed that half the populace had set forth in a rage to reform mankind, and their first need was to get the mayor to use the police force to help them. When they did not call at the office, they were writing letters. The favorite day for these expressions of the reforming spirit was Monday. I had been many months in the office however, before I was able to make this generalization, though from the first I could observe that Monday took on something of that dismal and somber tone which has given it its name of blue Monday. In the early days of a simpler life in our country, when the customs of the pioneer had not been superseded by the complexities of modern existence, its color used to be ascribed to the fact that it was wash day, and perhaps it has remained a sort of moral wash day ever since. At any rate we soon discovered that everyone who had a grievance or a complaint or a suggestion about his neighbor or some larger scheme of reforming whole groups of the population was most likely to be heavily charged with it on Monday, and since the almost universal conception among us is that all reforms can be wrought by the mayor, by the simple process of issuing an order to the police, these complaints were of course lodged at the mayor’s office.

They were of a curious variety, expressing, I suppose, not only all the moral yearnings of mankind, but all the meaner moods of human nature, and each new Monday morning seemed to have in reserve, for a nature that was trying to keep its faith in humanity, some fresh and theretofore unimagined instance of the depths of little meannesses to which human nature is capable of sinking. Many of them came in person with their criticism, others sent anonymous letters. Then there were those who came to repeat ugly things they had heard about me; “I wouldn’t tell you this if I were not your friend. I think you ought to know it.” Later in the afternoon the evenings’ newspapers, with the criticisms marked, were laid on my desk. All this made Monday the hardest day of the week, especially as the day closed with the hebdominal session of the council, where one might find now and then some pretty discouraging examples of human meanness. Tuesday was not quite so bad, though it was trying; human nature seemed to run pretty high, or pretty low, on that day, too. By Wednesday, the atmosphere began to clear, and by Thursday and Friday, everyone seemed to be attending to his own business and letting the faults of his neighbors go unnoted or at least unreported, and Saturday was a day of such calm that one’s whole faith in humanity was miraculously restored; if the weather was fine one might almost discover human nature as to be good as that nature which would reveal herself on the golf links.

As a result of it all we finally made the deduction--my secretary Bernard Dailey, the stenographers in the office and the reporters who formed so pleasant an element of the life there--that it was all due to the effects of the Sunday that had intervened. In the first place, people had leisure on that day and in that leisure they could whet up their consciences and set them to the congenial task of dissecting the characters of other people, or they could contemplate the evils in the world and resolve highly to make the mayor do away with them, and then after the custom of our land they could gorge on the huge Sunday noon dinner of roast beef, and then lie about all afternoon like pythons in a torpor which produced an indigestion so acute and lasting that for three days it passed very well for pious fervor and zeal for reform. Such at least was our theory, offered here solely in the scientific spirit, and not by any means as final. It was acquiesced in by all of us at the time, and has been supported by an unvarying series of data on the Monday mornings since then.

We submitted it to Henry Frisch, the police sergeant who had been detailed for duty in the mayor’s office for many years, a dear and comfortable soul, who had served under several mayors, and had developed a philosophy of life that was a very Nirvana of comfort and repose. Long ago, so it seemed when he smiled indulgently on the discomfiture of blue Monday, he had given up humanity as a bad job; to him the race was utterly and irredeemably hopeless, and without the need of saying a word he could shake his honest head at the suggestion of a new reform with a motion that was eloquent of all negation. He was very tolerant, however, and made no argument in rebuttal, he simply refused to accept humanity on any general plane; regarding the race as a biological species merely, he would confide to you that his years of experience at that post and as a policeman who had paced his beat and afterward commanded a sergeant’s squad, had convinced him that it was altogether depraved, dishonest and disgusting, but with any individual specimen of the species he was not that way at all. He was really kindness itself. The next minute, with tears in his eyes, he would go to any extremes to help some poor devil out of trouble. Unless it were reformers; for these he had no use, he said, and if his advice had been accepted he would have been permitted to expel them from the City Hall by their own beloved weapons of violence and force of arms. On Sundays he went fishing.

Perhaps at the time of which I am thinking, if not very specifically writing, there was more of this Monday spirit of reform than is usual. In the first place, much is expected of a new official and because he does not promptly work those miracles which are confidently expected whether he was foolish enough to promise them or not, he is so generally complained of that it may be set down as an axiom of practical politics that any elected official, in the executive branch of the government, could be recalled at any time during the first year of his incumbency of his office. Just then, too, there had been elected to the governorship a gentleman who had been very deeply devoted to the interests of the Methodist Church, the strongest denomination numerically in Ohio--the first governor of Ohio, indeed, was a Methodist preacher--and because of that fact and because of the use in his inaugural message of the magic phrase “law and order,” it was at once announced in the most sensational manner of the sensational press that, unless all the sumptuary laws in Ohio were drastically enforced, all the mayors of the cities would be removed. Governor Pattison had been elected as a Democrat, and during his campaign Tom Johnson and I had supported him, and it was while we were in Columbus at his inauguration that this sensation was exploited in the newspapers. I remember how Tom Johnson received it when one of his coterie brought the extra editions into the hotel and pointed out to him the dreadful predictions of the headlines; the white, aristocratic hand waved the suggestion imperiously aside, and he said:

“Four days, and it’ll all be over. That’s the life of a newspaper sensation.”

I believe that newspaper editors themselves place the limit of the effectiveness of a sensation at about that time, though some of them are so shrewd that they drop the sensation the day before the people begin to lose interest in it, instead of waiting for the day on which they actually tire of it. Which may be an explanation of the fact that the beginnings of things are always treated so much more fully in the press than their endings; one always reads of the opening of the trial, and the awful charge, but is never told how it all came out in the end, unless the end was catastrophic. The theory of the press is, I believe, that good news is no news.

I do not know that poor Governor Pattison ever had any intention of raising the issue of local self-government, and of raising it in such a direct and positive way as by attempting to remove all the mayors of Ohio towns and cities in which it could be shown that some little enactment of the legislature had failed of absolute enforcement; I suppose he had no such intention, since the law gave him no such power, though that made no difference to the professional reverencers and enforcers of law. The poor man never saw the governor’s office after that night of his brilliant inauguration, when he stood, very dark and weary, with features drawn, but resolutely smiling, at his levee in the senate chamber, a tragic figure in a way, the first Democratic governor in a long while, and the fates treating him with their customary irony and indignity by setting their seal upon him in the very hour of his triumph. He died in a few months, but there remained many of course who could prophesy in his name and cast out devils with each extra edition of the newspapers, and the discussion of law enforcement has gone on pretty steadily from that time to this.

XLI

I suppose the discussion is one which must go on always in any land where the people of our race and tradition dwell. A more objective, natural and naïve people would not be so interested in sin, and when the late Mayor Gaynor of New York spoke of the difficulty of administering the affairs of a modern city according to “the standard of exquisite morals” held aloft by some persons for others, he designated in his clear and clever way a class of citizens familiar to every mayor by the curiously doctrinaire order of indurated mind with which they are endowed. They begin with the naïve assumption that their standard is the one and only correct standard, and that since men have repeatedly refused to adopt it on mere inspection they must be forced to do so by the use of violence, a process which they call maintaining “law and order.” They believe that any wrong, any abuse, may be stopped instantly by the passage of a law, and if one venture to question the efficacy of any plan they propose, he is said at once to be opposed to morality and to religion, and is set down as a profane and sacrilegious person.

It is, of course, inconvenient to argue with a person who has the supreme refuge of the irrelevant conclusion; as inconvenient as it would be were one to be offered carbolic acid as a toilet article, and, upon refusal, be accused of not believing in cleanliness. This order of mind imagines that every phase of human conduct can be ordered and regulated by the enactment of statutes; that the industries, occupations, clothing, amusements, appetites, passions, prejudices, opinions, ambitions, aspirations and devotions of man can be changed, moulded and regulated by city councils and state legislatures. Every inconvenience, every difficulty, every disagreeable feature of modern life, is to be done away by the passage of a law.

That our race is saturated with this curious and amazing superstition of the power of written enactments is shown by the common terminology. The mental reactions of a large portion of mankind against the irritation of opposing opinion and conduct habitually express themselves in the phrase, “There ought to be a law.” It is heard as often every day as the stereotyped references to the weather. Not a disagreeable incident in life is complained of without that expression; no one has a pet aversion or a darling prejudice that he does not cherish the desire of having a law passed to bring the rest of the world around to his way of feeling. And when a trust is formed, or a strike interrupts business, or the sheets on the hotel bed are too short, or the hatpin of a woman in a crowded street car is too long, or a new dance is introduced, or a boor preëmpts a seat in a train, or a cat howls on the back-yard fence in the night time, or a waiter is impertinent, or the cook leaves, the indignant citizen lifts his eyes hopefully toward that annual calamity known as the session of the state legislature, and repeats the formula: “There ought to be a law.” And when the legislature assembles, a whole body of foolish bills is introduced regulating everything in the earth, and some things that are outside of the earth. If a deed is disapproved of by a group of people, an agitation is begun to make it a criminal offense; by means of pains and penalties the whole of life is to be regulated, and government is to become a vast bureaucracy of policemen, catch-polls, inspectors, beadles, censors, mentors, monitors and spies. As the session draws toward its close, the haste to enact all these measures becomes frantic. I shall never forget those scenes of riot, the howling and drunkenness and confusion and worse I have witnessed in the legislatures of Illinois and of Ohio the last night of the session. And all this delirium goes on in every state of the Union, every winter--and all these enactments must be revered. It is the phase of the apotheosis of the policeman, who is to replace nurse and parent and teacher and pastor, and, relieving all these of their responsibilities, undertake to remould man into a being of absolute perfection, in whom character may be dispensed with, since he is to dwell forever under the crystal dome of a moral vacuum from which temptation has been scientifically exhausted.

The reason is simple, and obvious; it inheres in the belief in the absolute. Your true reformer is not only without humor, without pity, without mercy, but he is without knowledge of life or of human nature, and without very much of any sort of sweetness and light. The more moral he is, the harder he is, and the more amazingly ready with cruel judgments; and he seldom smiles except with the unction that comes with the thought of his own moral superiority. He thinks there is an absolute good and an absolute bad, and hence absolutely good people and absolutely bad people.

The peculiar and distinguishing feature of his mind is that life is presented to it in stark and rigid outline. He is blandly unconscious of distinctions; he has no perception of proportions, no knowledge of values, in a word, no sense of humor. His world is made up of wholly unrelated antitheses. There are no shades or shadows, no gradations, no delicate and subtle relativities. A thing is either black or white, good or bad. A deed is either moral or immoral, a virtue or a crime. It is all very simple. All acts of which he does not himself approve are evil; all who do not think and act as he thinks and acts, are bad. If you do not know when a deed, or an opinion is wrong, he will tell you; and if you doubt him or differ with him, you are bad, and it is time to call in the police. “Whenever the Commons has nothing else to do,” said the wise old member of Parliament, “it can always make a new crime.” Statutes are thus enacted, as the saying is, against all evils, great and small, and the greater the evil, of course, the greater the moral triumph expressed by the mere enactment. But because of certain contrarieties in nature and a certain obstreperous quality in human nature and a general complexity in life as a whole these legal fulminations are frequently triumphs only in theory, and in practice often intensify the very ills they seek to cure. As the witty Remy de Gourmont says: _Quand la morale triomphe il se passes des choses très vilaines._

The more intensively developed specimen of the type will not overtly sin himself, but he loves to inspect those who do, and to peer at them, and to wonder how they could ever have the courage to do it; he likes to imagine their sensations, and to note each one of them as it was developed in the interesting experience. And hence the psychic lasciviousness of those who are constantly reporting plays and pictures as fit for the censor they are always clamoring for. Sometimes they go slumming as students of the evils of society. They are like pious uncles who never swear themselves under any circumstances, but relate stories of other men who do, recite their delightful experiences and roll out the awful oaths with which the profane gave vent to their feelings with a relish that is no doubt a relief to their own.