Part 22
My friends among them were like him in the condemnation they had to hear from the machine, or, perhaps I should say, the governing or directing committee--whatever the euphemism that cloaks the familiar phenomenon with them--they too were said to be no Socialists at all; they were mere “intellectuals” or “sentimentalists,” or easily fell into some other of the categories the Socialists have provided for every manifestation of life. They have doubtless rendered society a service by their minute classification; which seems complete if they would only recognize the order of the sectarian mind, and since the orthodox among them afford so typical an example, include themselves in it. I am not sure that it is not quite as distinct a species as the capitalist class itself, at least it causes as much trouble in the world as the Socialists say the capitalist class creates. Socialists, at least of the impossibilist wing, evangelists, prohibitionists, Puritans, policemen and most of the rest of the reformers are endowed with this order of mind. While they all form subdivisions of a distinct intellectual class of humanity these are generally the same. That is, they are, all of them, always under all circumstances, right. All of these classes, fundamentally, follow the same sequences of thought. They differ of course in minor details, but they always meet on that narrow strip of ground upon which they have erected their inflexible model for humanity, with just room enough by its side for the scaffold upon which to hang those who do not accept it.
Now, when, by any coincidence, the representatives of any two of these species meet in the mistaken supposition that there is any disagreement between them, there is bound to be trouble of course, and whenever say a Socialist of the impossibilist wing of the party, and a policeman--and all good policemen are impossibilists--meet, we have posited the old problem in physics of an irresistible body meeting an impenetrable substance.
This phenomenon occurred on two or three occasions when policemen interfered with Socialists speaking in the streets. I am sure the Socialists in question could have regretted the circumstance no more than I, for if there was one right which I tried to induce the police to respect, it was the right of free speech. On the whole they did fairly well, and at a time when there seemed to be an epidemic of ferocity among municipal officials in the land that led them to all sorts of unwarranted interferences with human and constitutional rights, we had folk of all sorts preaching their strange doctrines in our streets--Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, of their several sorts, I. W. W.’s, evangelists, anarchists, suffragists, Mormons, Salvationists, to say nothing of all the religious sects; wisdom was veritably crying in the streets. Emma Goldman, during that period of hysteria when the advent of that little woman in a city precipitated a siege of fear, delivered her course of lectures in Toledo to audiences that were very small, since there were no police to insure the attendance of those who were interested more in sensations than in her philosophic discussions of the German drama. And we tried to respect the rights of all.
But it is one thing to give orders, and another to have them implicitly obeyed. Those of the indurated sectarian mind, who would order all life by mechanism, are given to saying that if they were in authority the police would do so and so, and would not do such and such a thing, that they would have the police see to this and that, etc., etc., etc. After they had been in power a while they would grow humble, if not discouraged, and, like me, be gratified if they succeeded in accomplishing about one-third of what they had hoped and planned to accomplish. Thus I, who had tried to give everybody the right of free speech, was now and then chagrined to find that someone had been interfered with for preaching some new heresy.
The right of free speech cherished by all and exercised by none, since, owing to a disposition on the part of humanity to apply the hemlock or the noose in such cases, few say what they actually think, is one which certain of the Socialists preferred to have honored in the breach rather than in the observance. They would be never so happy, never so much in their element as when their address was interrupted; the greater the interference, the more acute the suffering for the cause, and when a man begins to feel that there is in him the blood of the martyrs, which, as he has heard somewhere, is the seed of the churches, why, of course, he is in such an exalted state of mind that there is no human way of dealing with him.
And then that strange human spark, that mysterious thing we call personality, is always there--that element which makes impossible any perfectly or ideally organized state, social or otherwise. It is assumed by those of the order of mind under notice that it is possible so to organize human affairs that they will work automatically, with the precision of a machine, that they will work just as they are intended to work and in no other way, that it is, indeed, impossible for them to work in any other way, and that it may be predicted long in advance exactly how they will work at any given instant and under any exigency, or circumstance. This, of course, is impossible, as everybody knows, except the impossibilists. That is why they are impossibilists.
These speakers, however, who would dehumanize everything yet cannot after all dehumanize themselves, would frequently court arrest in the belief that the meed of pseudo-martyrdom thereby made possible was an ornament to their cause, and they would often try the patience of officers, who like the speakers themselves and all of us, are unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, only human. Thus a Socialist speaker standing on his soap box, in the course of his remarks, indulged in certain reflections on the police as an institution. His sentiments in that respect were not perhaps heterodox, from the standpoint of my own orthodoxy, but we had been trying to create _esprit de corps_ in the police department, and the policeman on that beat chancing to arrive at that inauspicious moment, and viewing life from an altitude less lofty and impersonal than the Socialist claimed for his outlook, took the scientific statements of the Socialist not in the academic sense, but as a personal reflection upon the body of which he, it seems, was growing rather proud of being a member, and at the conclusion of the effort he privately informed the speaker that if he said anything more against the Toledo Police Department he would “knock his block off.” He was reprimanded by his lieutenant, even after he had explained that he intended to execute his rude intention in his private and not in his official capacity.
The incident could be represented by the Socialists as a veritable reflection of the views of the administration on the important subject of Socialism, but they could not derive quite the satisfaction from it they had in another incident, or accident, which befell the most prominent and authoritative of their local leaders. He was speaking one evening in a crowded street, when he had the good fortune to be arrested by a captain of police. He made the occasion the opportunity for an edifying debate, and lingered as long as the captain would let him; but, in the end, was led to the police headquarters. This was the irresistible meeting the impenetrable. While everybody had a right to speak his mind in the streets, everybody else, we felt, had an equal right not to listen, even to free speech, and the police had orders to keep the streets and sidewalks clear for traffic. Now this captain was a chap who carried out orders given to him, and, as he was in command of the traffic squad, traffic was his specialty. If streets were to be cleared, then, in his philosophy, they were to be cleared, and no little thing like a constitutional inhibition against the abridgment of human speech would stand in his way. And then, after all, police are more apt to arrest people they do not like than those they do, and no one likes those who disagree with him. But after the arrest, the offender is turned out without chances of reparation. In this instance, feeling that the Socialist had had an indignity put upon him by his arrest, while I could not undo what had been done, I could order his release and tender him an official apology in writing, which was accepted, though not acknowledged. And an order was issued that a policemen who thereafter interfered with any voice crying in the wilderness should be dismissed from the department.
LVI
As a boy, thirty years ago, I used to observe, with a boy’s interest, the little bob-tailed street cars that went teetering and tinkling, at intervals of half an hour, out a long street that ran within a block of my home. I watched the cars intently, and so intently that the impressions of their various colors, sounds and smells have remained with me to this day, speaking, in a way, of the conditions of a small American city of that time, and affording a means by which to measure that progress in material efficiency which is so often mistaken for progress in speculative thought.
It may have been that my interest was intensified by the fact that down in Urbana Street cars were unknown, though they were not unimagined, since we used to see them when we went to Cincinnati, and I could then, and I can still, recall, though time has softened the poignancy of that hour, the pain of parting with a certain noble horse which my father sold to a man of dark and hateful aspect, and of the morsel of comfort I derived from the stipulation, invalid enough to be sure, my father made with the dealer, that the horse was not to be put to street-car service. That, by my father, and so by me myself, was held to be the most cruel, degrading and ignoble fate that could befall a horse. But another reason for my interest was the possession of a curiosity to which the passing show has always been novel, generally amusing, sometimes pleasing and often saddening, too--a curiosity in life which I hope will endure fresh and wholesome until life’s largest curiosity shall be satisfied at the end of life.
The progress of the little street car under notice was leisurely and deliberate, sometimes it would wait obligingly for a woman, half a block away, who hurried puffing, and fluttering, and waving, to reach the street corner, and when she had clambered aboard, the driver would slowly unwind his brake, cluck to his horse, the rope traces would strain and the car would bowl along. Ten blocks away from the business section, or a few blocks further on, the little car with its five windows and small hooded platform would enter upon a bare, though expectant scene of vacant lots, and about a mile out, where there was some lonely dwelling staring blankly and reproachfully as though it had been misled, and then abandoned, and further on a few small, expectant cottages, the long, low street-car barn was reached, the car was driven on to a little turntable, slowly turned about and started back. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I had a chance to witness the change of horses, and to experience a nebulous pity for the nag that ambled contentedly into the stable, and did not seem to be very tired after all.
On Summit Street there were grander cars, each drawn by two horses, and there were other lines in town, each with its cars painted a distinguishing color. There was one line that went out Collingwood Avenue, far to the very country itself; its cars bowled under noble trees and even past a stately mansion or two, or what in those days seemed stately mansions, and it was pleasant, it was even musical, to hear the tinkle of the bell on the horse’s collar. Then there was still another line that ran down the broad Maumee River, almost to Maumee Bay and the “marsh” where the French _habitants_ lived, and spoke delightfully like the people in Dr. Drummond’s poems. On Saturday mornings my father was likely to send me on an errand to a superannuated clergyman who lived down there, and this involved a long, irritating journey. The journey occupied the whole morning, and spoiled a holiday. And then it was always cold, for, in the not too clear retrospect, I seem to have been sent on this particular errand only in winter, and the car was the coldest place in the world, especially when it got down where the winds from the icy lake could strike it. Its floor was strewn recklessly with yellow straw, in some ironical pretense of keeping the car warm, and I would sit there with feet slowly freezing in the rustling straw, and after I had inspected the two or three passengers, there was nothing to do but to read the notice over the fare-box in the front end of the car, until I had it quite by heart:
“The driver will furnish change to the amount of Two Dollars, returning the full amount, thus enabling the passenger to put the exact fare in the box.”
Then I could peer up toward the fare-box and look at the one nickel stranded half-way down its zig-zag chute, and look at the driver, standing on the front platform, slowly rocking from one foot to the other, bundled up in old overcoats, with his cap pulled down and his throat and chin muffled in a repulsive woolen scarf, hoary with the frost of his breath, and nothing of him visible except the shining red point of his frosted nose. His hands, one holding the reins, the other the brake-handle, were lost in the various strata of mittens that marked epochs co-extensive with those of the several overcoats. I had read once in a newspaper of a street-car driver in Indianapolis who, at the end of his run, never moved, but kept right on standing there, and when the barn-boss swore at him, it was found that he was dead, frozen at his post. And I sometimes wondered, as I dwelt on that fascinating horror, if it were possible that sometime, when the car reached the bay, this driver would not be found frozen. Sometimes I expected to be found frozen myself, but nothing exciting ever happened on that journey, and so, somehow, the trips out other streets and other avenues in other cars, remain more pleasantly in the memory, associated with the sunshine and the leafy arch of green overhead, with something of the romance and mystery of untraveled roads in the long vista ahead, while the winter trip down to the superannuated clergyman’s is cold and bleak and desolate, perhaps because it had no more interesting result than the few minutes I begrudged in that stiff little “parlor,” where the preacher received me with the not unkindly regard of eyes that had the dazed expression of the very old. I can expiate the perfectly patent and impolite reluctance with which I visited the aged man, and the thoughtless contempt youth has for age itself, only by the hope that those dim eyes have since brightened at the realization of those glories they had so long foreseen, which formed perhaps the only consolation of a life that must have had little to gladden it on that forbidding spot.
All these lines, and others like them in the sprawling young town, belonged each to different men, and once I happened to hear that the man who owned the line first mentioned say that every new family that moved into that thoroughfare or built a house there, meant $73.00 a year to him. A good many families moved out into that street, enough indeed to make a settlement that was a town in itself, growing and spreading at the end of the line. Gradually the gaunt vacancies between were built up, though not, it appears, until the man had grown discouraged and sold out, and so suffered the universal fate of the pioneer. One by one the other lines in town were sold, and finally a day came when all the lines were owned by a certain few men, who under our purely individualistic legal system, formed a company and thus could jointly rejoice in all the individual rights and privileges of a person, without any of his embarrassing moral duties and responsibilities.
I ceased to hear of the individual owner any more; I never saw him in his shirt-sleeves in his little office at the end of the line counting up the nickels of those new families which each meant $73.00 per annum to him, and it must have been about the same time that I began to hear of the traction company. There had been probably intervening experiments with tough mules, whom no one pitied, as everyone had pitied the horses they replaced, and there were, in other cities, astounding miracles of cable cars and elevated railways. And then electricity came as a motive power, and the streets were made hideous by the gaunt poles and makeshifts of wires, and the trolley cars came, and increased in size and numbers, and families swarmed, until out on those streets and avenues the great yellow cars went rushing and clanging by, with multitudes of people clinging to the straps and, toward evening, swarming like flies on the broad rear platforms, and the conductors in their blue uniforms shouting “Step lively!” with a voice as authoritative as that which the company spoke in the city councils. And the families continued to arrive, and to build houses, and to toil and to contribute each its $73.00 a year, though they did it with human reluctance and complaint, and grew dimly conscious that somewhere in the whole complicated transaction an injustice lurked. And finally this hidden injustice became the chief public concern of the people of the town, and an issue in local politics for more than a decade.
LVII
It had been an issue, as I have more than once said in Jones’s time and in his campaigns, though the issues his tremendous personality raised were so vast and so general and so fundamental that they included all issues, as Emerson said his reform included all reforms. It ran like a scarlet thread through the warp and woof of our communal life; it was somehow associated with the ambitions of the meanest politician, it affected the fortunes of every man in business, and it was the means whereby the community came to have an ideal. The long story of it, like the story of the same interest in any town, would include triumphs and tragedies--and the way of politics through the town was strewn with the pitiable wrecks of character and of life itself that had been ruthlessly sacrificed to the insatiable greed of privilege. Only the other day one such wreck, once in a position of honor and trust in the municipality, was waiting in the outer office; he wanted half a dollar and a place to sleep. And another like him, most desperate of all, asked to be committed to a city hospital or even to the asylum for the insane; he had no other refuge, and as for the poorhouse, he said, not yet, not yet! And these were the sacrifices privilege demanded of its parasites; though their case morally, at least, could be no worse than that of privilege’s principal beneficiaries; not half so bad indeed, since they had lost the power of appreciation of spiritual values.
I knew a reporter, an Irish lad, whom one of the attorneys of privilege sought to “befriend.”
“You work pretty hard, don’t you?” asked the attorney.
“Yes,” said the Irish lad.
“And your salary is small?”
“Yes.”
“And a mortgage on your mother’s home?” The agents of privilege always know a man’s necessities!
“Yes.”
“Well, now, I can tell you how things can be eased up a bit for you. For instance----”
After the proposal had been artfully made, the Irish lad thought a moment, and then he raised those blue eyes to the old lawyer.
“Your wife is prominent socially, isn’t she?”
“Why, yes.”
“President of--this and that, eh?”
“Yes.”
“And your daughters just home from a finishing school in Europe, aren’t they?”
“Yes--but what----?”
“I was wondering,” said the Irish lad, rising, “how you dared go home at night and look ’em in the face.”
Not all men though have the character, the moral resistance of that Irish lad, and the scores of the weak and erring ones are the tragic figures in the long drama of the traction company in the city, in any city--the drama that cannot be written.
LVIII
Meanwhile, the education of the general mind went on, and we were, after all, tending somewhither. Our experience in the greatest of our tasks demonstrated that, and in the change that gradually took place in sentiment concerning the street railway problem, there was an evidence of the development of a mass consciousness, a mass will, which some time in these cities of ours will justify democracy. It is of course the most difficult process in the world, for a mass of two hundred thousand people to unite in the expression of a will concerning a single abstract proposition. The mass to be sure can now and then as it were rear its head and blaze forth wrath and accomplish some instant work of destruction; even if it be nothing more than the destruction of an individual reputation. That is why the recall is so popular and so generously and frequently employed in those cities that have it. In such elections, with their personal and human center of interest, the people all turn out, while in a referendum involving some abstract principle, the vote cast is always small. That is why the referendum is so important, and the recall, relatively, so unimportant; the use of the first in the long run will afford a fine schooling for the people.
The most familiar expression of this rage of course was the clamor for the indictment and imprisonment of someone connected in sinister ways with the company, a demand with which I never had the slightest sympathy, to which I could never yield the slightest acquiescence. What good, though all the poor and miserable servitors of privilege were put in prison, while privilege itself remained? Such clamors have had their results; a few more broken lives, a little more sorrow and shame in the world, and the clamor ceases, and things go on the same as before.
It is this instability, this variableness, this weariness of the public mind, on which privilege depends, with a cynical trust so often justified that it might breed cynicism in all observant and reflective natures. The street railway proprietors in Toledo expected each election to demonstrate this weariness in the people, and to restore them to, or at least confirm them in, the privileges they had enjoyed under the old régime.
For a people to assume and for a decade consistently to maintain an attitude toward a public question therefore was a triumph of the democratic principle. That is what the people of Cleveland did; that is what the people of Detroit did; that is what the people of Toledo did. The successive stages of this process were most interesting to observe, the more especially since they caught in the movement even some of the street railway group and its political confreres themselves.