Part 17

It is, I suppose, our inheritance from the Puritans, or the worst of our inheritance from the Puritans, and it is possible that it is worth while to have paid the penalty as a price for the best we derived from them, since one has to take the bad with the good, though in those days I often wished that the bequest had gone to some other of the heirs. Perhaps in thus speaking of the good we had from them, I am merely yielding to the fear of saying openly what I have often thought, namely, that the good we had from the Puritans has been immensely overestimated and exaggerated, and is not one whit better or greater in quantity or influence than that we had from the Cavaliers, or for that matter from the latest emigrant on Ellis Island. They themselves appreciated their own goodness, and we have always taken their words for granted. I have often thought that some day, when I had the elegant leisure necessary to such a task, I should like to write “A History of Puritanism,” or, since I should have to place the beginnings of the monumental work in Rome as far back at least as the reign of the first Emperor, perhaps I should be less ambitious and content myself with writing “A History of Puritanism in the United States of America.” I should have to begin the larger work at that interesting period of the history of Rome when the weary Augustus was being elected and reëlected president against his will and trying to gratify the spirit of Puritanism that was even in such people as those Romans, by enacting all sorts of sumptuary laws and foolish prohibitions, and trying out to miserable failures every single one of the proposals that have since that time been made over and over again in the hope of regenerating mankind. The story of how the Emperor’s own daughter was almost the first to disobey his regulations is dramatic enough to conclude rather than to begin any history, and yet I could write it with much more pity than I could the story of those Puritans who abounded in my own locality in my own time. To write fairly and philosophically of them I should have to wait not only for a leisure so large and so elegant that I am certain never to have it, but I should have to cultivate a philosophic calm which I own with shame is far from me when I think of some of the things they, or some of them, did in their efforts to force their theories on others. I should not recall such things now, and if I were to put them in that monumental and scholarly work of my imagination, it should be, of course, only in the cold scientific spirit, and as specimens, say in nonpariel type, at the foot of the page with the learned annotations.

XLII

Speaking of this passion for laws and regulations and how some of the zealous would order even the most private and personal details of life in these states, Mr. Havelock Ellis, in a brilliant chapter of his work, “The Task of Social Hygiene,” takes occasion to observe that “nowhere in the world is there so great an anxiety to place the moral regulation of social affairs in the hands of police,” and that “nowhere are the police more incapable of carrying out such regulation.” The difficulty is due of course to the fact that the old medieval confusion of crime and vice persists in a community where the Puritan tradition still strongly survives. The incapability, as has been pointed out, is not so much in the policemen as in that _bêtisse humaine_ which expects such superhuman work of them.

This insistent confusion of vice with crime has not only had the effect of fostering both, but is the cause of the corruption of the police. Their proper function is to protect life and property and maintain the public peace, and this the police of American cities perform as well as policemen anywhere. But when, by a trick of the sectarian mind, the term _crime_ is made to include all the follies and weaknesses and vices of humanity, where there is added the duty of enforcing statutes against a multitude of acts, some of which only Puritanical severity classes as crimes, others of which are regarded by the human beings in the community with indifference, tolerance or sympathy, while still others are inherent in mysterious and imperative instincts which balk all efforts at general control, the task becomes wholly impossible and beyond human ability.

The police know it, and everybody knows it, and it is the hypocrisy of society that corrupts them. The police know, intuitively, and without any process of ratiocination, that people are human, and subject to human frailties; they are pretty human themselves, and, in common with most of the people in the community, see no great wrong in some of the things that are done which the sumptuary laws condemn. Most of them, for instance, drink a glass of beer now and then, or play a game of cards, or go to a baseball game on Sunday. They are not apt to be gentlemen of the most refined and exquisite tastes. And it is difficult to induce men to take much interest in punishing acts their own consciences do not condemn. This, with the situation at its best; at its worst, knowing that, despite all the enactments of legislatures, people will continue in their hardened ways, they are apt to abuse their power. For they know, too, that the statutes prohibiting the merely venial of those acts oftentimes run counter to the urban custom and that the community regards it as of no great consequence if they are not enforced. Thus a wide discretion is permitted the police by the public conscience in the discharge of their duties, and this discretion is one which quite humanly they proceed to abuse. If they choose, they may enforce the sumptuary laws against certain persons or refrain from doing so, and the opportunity for corruption is presented. The opportunity widens, opens into a larger field, and not only does the corruption spread, but it is not long before the police are employing extra legal methods in other directions, and at last in many instances establish an actual tyranny that would not be tolerated in a monarchy. The result is that we read every day of arbitrary interferences by policemen with most of the constitutional rights, such as free speech, the right of assembly and petition, etc. They even set up a censorship and condemn paintings, or prohibit the performance of plays, or assume to banish women from the streets because they are dressed in a style which the police do not consider _comme il faut_.

And while the corruption is deplored and everywhere causes indignation and despair, this tyranny does not seem to excite resistance or even remark; the press, the paladium of our liberties, does not often protest against it, and few seem to have sufficient grasp of the principle to care anything about it.

There is a story somewhere of a little girl, homeless, supperless, shivering in rags in the cold rain of the streets of New York, and of a passer-by observing in a kind of sardonic sympathy:

“And she is living under the protection of sixteen thousand laws!”

“Ah, yes,” said his friend, perhaps a professional reformer of third persons, who naturally lacked a sense of humor; “but they were not enforced!”

It is not altogether inconceivable that if all the laws had been enforced the little girl’s condition would have been even worse than it was, considering how haphazard had been the process of making all those laws, and how, if set in motion, many of them would have clashed with each other.

If they were effective, the whole of human kind would have been translated, like Enoch, long ago. Of course, the assertion that they had not been enforced was the obvious retort. And it was true, because it is impossible to enforce all of them. And what is more no one believes that all the laws should be enforced, all the time,--that is, no one believes in absolute law enforcement, since no one believes that the laws should be enforced against _him_. Everybody hates a policeman just as everybody loves a fireman. And yet the fire department and the police department are composed of the same kind of men, paid the same salaries, and responsible to the same authorities. The duty of the fireman is, of course, the simpler, because there is no disagreement among men about the thing to be done. When a fire breaks out in the city, the fire department is expected to rush to the spot, to pour water on the fire, and to continue pouring water on the fire until it ceases to burn. The reforming mind seems to think that the duty of the policeman is of equal simplicity, and that when a wrong is done, the sole duty of the police consists in rushing immediately to that spot, seizing the wrongdoer, and, by confining him in a prison, thereby eradicate his tendency to do wrong, and, by holding him up as an example to others who are considering the commission of that wrong, to deter them from it.

As far as crimes are concerned, the policemen, indeed, do fairly well. Though that they succeed in any measure at all in discharging their functions is a wonder when one considers the contumely and abuse that are constantly heaped upon them in all our cities. The newspapers, when there are no accounts of crime to print--and the assumption is that crimes and casualties, if they are horrid enough, are the principal events in the annals of mankind worth chronicling--can always print suggestions of the crimes of the police. The reporter, a human being himself, dissatisfied because the policemen cannot gratify his hunger for sensation, is not to blame, perhaps; he views life from the standpoint of his own necessities, and his conception of life is of a series of exciting tragedies enacted with a view to making the first edition interesting, so that the ears of the populace may be assaulted in the gloom of each evening’s dusk by that hideous bellowing of the news “boy,” whose heavy voice booms through the shade like some mighty portent of disaster in the world.

This all sounds pretty hopeless, but if morals are to be wrought by and through policemen, I am sure we shall have to pay higher salaries, and procure men who are themselves so moral that their consciences are troubled only by the sins of others; there is no other way. Unless, of course, anything is left in these modern days of the theory of the development of individual character. But that is the program of a thousand years.

As for the future of municipal government in this land, I venture to set down this prediction: That no appreciable advance will be made, no appreciable advance can be made in any fundamental sense, so long as the so-called moral issue is the pivot on which municipal elections turn, or so long as it is allowed to remain to bedevil officials, to monopolize their time and to exhaust their energies, so that they have little of either left for their proper work of administration.

Either cities must have home rule, including the local police power, with the right to regulate amusements and resorts and even vices according to the will of the people in that city, whatever the rural view may be, or some authority other than the mayor, and far wiser and nobler than any mayor I ever knew or heard of, must be raised up by the state in whom may be united the powers and functions of a beadle, a censor, and a dictator. I have not the slightest idea where one so wise and pure is to be found, but doubtless there are plenty who do, if their modesty would permit them to speak.

XLIII

I used to recall, during the early and acute phase of this discussion, an incident that occurred in the old Springfield days in Loami, down in the Sangamon country. The little village in those days could boast an institution unlike any, perhaps, in the land, unless it were to be found in some small hamlet in the South. In the public square, on a space worn smooth and hard as asphalt, a great circle was drawn, and here, every day when the weather was fine, a company of old men gathered and played marbles. What the game was I do not know; some development of one of the boys’ games, no doubt, but with what improvements and embellishments only the old men who understood and played it could say. Its enthralled votaries played with large marbles, which spun from their gnarled and horny knuckles all day long, with a shifting crowd of onlookers gaping at their prowess. The players were old and dignified, and took their sport seriously. There were to be seen, about that big ring, sages who had sat on juries and been swayed by the arguments of Lincoln; there were gray veterans who had gone with Sherman to the sea and had been with Grant at Appomattox; and now, in their declining years, they found pleasure and a mildly stimulating excitement in this exercise. The skill they developed in the game is said by those who have studied the subject on the ground to have been considerable; some testify that these elders had raised their sport to the point of scientific dignity, and that the ability they displayed ranked them as the equals of golfers or of billiardists.

The exciting tournaments went on for years, the old gentlemen were happy, the little village was peaceful and contented, when suddenly the town was shocked by a new sensation. Loami elected a reform administration. How it came about I do not know; some local muckraker may have practiced his regenerating art, or perhaps some little rivulet of the reform wave just then inundating the larger world outside may have trickled down into Loami. What privilege in the town was menaced I do not know; what portion of eminent respectability felt its perquisites in danger I cannot say; but Privilege seems to have done what it always does when pursued--namely, it began to cry for the reformation of persons instead of conditions. The new reform mayor, like many another mayor, was influenced; and, looking about for someone to reform, his eye wandered out of the window of the town hall one May morning and lighted on the grizzled marble-players, and he ordered the constable into action.

Upon what legal grounds he based his edict I cannot say. It is not vital for, as there were about sixteen thousand laws then running in his jurisdiction, it would not have been difficult to justify his action on legal grounds. It will be remembered that the old men were playing in the public square; perhaps they played “for keeps,” and it may have been that there were certain little understandings of a speculative nature on the side. Above all, the old men were enjoying themselves, and if this were not a sufficient offense what could be? And if a constable’s highest duty were not to interfere with the enjoyment of other folks what would become of the constitution and the law?

At any rate the old men were forbidden to play, their game was rudely interrupted, their ring obliterated, their marbles confiscated. There was, of course, resistance; some skirmishing and scrimmaging; a heated, acrimonious proceeding in the mayor’s court, and afterward hatred and strife and bad feeling, the formation of factions, and other conditions catalogued under law and order. But at length the space worn so smooth under the trees near the bandstand was sodded, and the old fellows might gather in silent contemplation of a new sign, “Keep off the Grass,” and reflect upon this supreme vindication of authority.

But Loami is a democracy, or as much of a democracy as the state will permit it to be, and when the next election rolled around the old men were alert, and after an exciting contest they elected a mayor of their own, a liberal. The reform mayor was relegated to the political limbo of one-termers, the privileged few preserved their privileges, and the old men, skinning the sod off that portion of the public square, drew anew their huge bull-ring, resumed their game, and everybody was happy and unreformed except, of course, the reformers; though perhaps they were happy, too, in their restored misery of having something to complain about and to wag their heads over.

In relating this veracious little tale of the lid of Loami, perhaps I have not sufficiently revealed that attitude of moral sympathy toward the good characters in the story which Tolstoy insists a writer should always assume and maintain. But this has not been due to any want of that sympathy. In the shadows of the scene the figure of the mayor, for instance, has ever been present--the keenest sufferer, the most unhappy man of them all. He was the one of all of them who was burdened with official responsibility; the marble-playing faction was happy in that it had no responsibility save of that light, artificial sort imposed by the rules of its game; its conscience, indeed, was untroubled. The other faction--the goo-goos, or whatever they were called in Loami--felt responsible primarily for the short-comings of others; their consciences were troubled only by the sins of other people, the easiest and most comfortable, because it is the most normal, position that the human conscience can assume. But the mayor was held responsible for everything and everybody, and in seeking to do his duty he found that difficulty which must everywhere increase in a society and a civilization which, in casting off some of its old moorings, recognizes less the responsibility of parent and teacher, not to mention personal responsibility, and is more and more disposed to look to the law and its administrators as the regulators and mentors of conduct.

XLIV

It is an axiom of municipal politics that a reform administration, or an administration elected as a protest against the evils of machine government, boss rule, and the domination of public service corporations, is immediately confronted by the demand of those who call themselves the good people to enforce all the sumptuary laws and to exterminate vice. That is, the privileged interests and their allies and representatives seek to divert the attention of the administration from themselves and their larger and more complex immoralities to the small and uninfluential offenders, an old device, always, in the hope of escape, inspired by privilege when pursued, just as friends of the fox might turn aside the hounds by drawing the aniseed bag across the trail. Many a progressive administration in this land has been led into that _cul de sac_, and as Mr. Carl Hovey observed recently of the neat saying to the effect that the way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it, the process usually proves to be merely the way to get rid of a good administration. The effort had been made by the opponents of Golden Rule Jones and it had failed. It had been attempted in the case of Tom Johnson and it had failed, though curiously enough the effort was never made in Toledo or in Cleveland or in Cincinnati, or elsewhere for that matter, in the days of machine domination. The Puritan never lets his religion interfere with business.

I used often to recall, in those days, a witty saying of Mr. William Travers Jerome, when he was District Attorney in New York. He said he often wished that there were two volumes of the Revised Statutes, one to contain the laws enacted for human beings, and the other to embalm the moral yearnings of rural communities.

It was disturbing and discouraging, of course, to feel that out there in the community there was this shadowy mass of well intentioned people, the most of whom no doubt, in common with all the rest of us, did wish to see moral improvement, and yet so misconstrued and misinterpreted our efforts. It was saddening, too, because in the work we were trying to do we should have liked their sympathy, their interest and their support. Because of their wider opportunity of enlightenment much better and nobler things might have been demanded of them, but as Johnson Thurston one night pointed out, they did not show as much civic spirit, as much concern for the common weal as those of smaller opportunities, those bad people as they called them of whom much less would naturally have been expected. I made a rule, as I have already said somewhere in these pages, not to talk back, or to argue with them. They viewed life from the Puritan standpoint, and I suppose that I viewed it from the pagan standpoint. The sins of others and their mistakes and failures never did excite in me that moral indignation which exists in the breasts of some; perhaps the old distinction between bad people and good people had been blurred in my consciousness. I could see that the bad people did many good things in their lives, and that the good people thought many dark and evil thoughts. I had seen indeed so much more kindness and consideration, so much more pity and mercy shown by the bad that I felt strengthened in my philosophy and in my belief that if their environment could be improved, if they could have a better chance in life, they would be as good as anybody. It seemed to me that most of the crime in the world was the result of involuntary poverty, and the tremendous, perhaps insuperable task, was to make involuntary poverty impossible. But in the meantime there was other work to be done. Aside from the problem of transportation which was but one phase of the great struggle between privilege and the people, of plutocracy with democracy, there were civic centers, city halls, markets, swimming pools, bridges to be built, parks to be improved, boulevards and parkways to be laid out, a filtration plant to be installed, improvements in all of the other departments, a great mass of wonderful work for the promotion of the public amenities, the public health, and the adornment of the city, in a word, there was a city to be built, and strangely enough this group of objectors of whom I have been speaking, were so intensely preoccupied with moral considerations that they never had even the slightest interest in these improvements. I think it is this spirit of Puritanism that has made the cities of America so ugly, or permitted them to be ugly; such conceptions as beauty and ugliness are perhaps impossible to minds that know no distinction but good and bad, and for this reason it has been difficult to make an æsthetic appeal with any effectiveness.