Part 4
You yourself cannot turn Niagara; but there is not a town in America where one single man cannot make his force felt against the whole torrent. He takes a stand on a practical matter. He takes action against some abuse. What does this accomplish? Everything. How many people are there in your town? Well, every one of them gets a thrill that strikes deeper than any sermon he ever heard. He may howl, but he hears. The grocer’s boy, for the first time in his life, believes that the whole outfit of morality has any place in the practical world. Every class contributes its comment. Next year a new element comes forward in politics, as if the franchise had been extended. Remember this: you cannot, though you owned the world, do any good in it except by devising new ways of manifesting the fact that you felt in a particular way. It is the personal influence of example that is the power. Nothing else counts. You can do harm by other methods, but not good. This influence is a natural force, and works like steam power. Why all this commotion over your protest? If you accuse the mayor of being a thief, why does he not reply, in the words of modern philosophy, “Of course I’m a thief, I’m made that way”? Instead of that he resents it, and there ensues a discussion that takes people’s attention off of trade, and qualifies the atmosphere of the place. You have appreciably relieved the tension and checked the plague.
This whole subject must be looked at as a crusade in the cause of humanity. You are making it easier for every young man in town to earn his livelihood without paying out his soul and conscience. You cannot help any one man. You are forced into helping them all at once. Every time a man asserts himself he cuts a cord that is strangling somebody. The first time that independent candidates for local office were run in New York City, strong men cried in the street for rage. The supremacy of commerce had been affronted. New York, in all that makes life worth living, is a new city since the reform movements began to break up the torpor of serfdom.
You asked how to fight force. It must be fought with force, and not with arguments. Indeed, it is easier to start a reform and carry it through, than it is to explain either why or how it is done. You can only understand this after you have been three times ridiculed as a reformer; and then you will begin to see that throughout the community, running through every one, there are currents of beneficent power that accomplish changes, sometimes visible, sometimes hard to see; that this power is in its nature quite as strong, quite as real and reliable, as that Wall Street current,--terrible forces both of them, forever operative and struggling and contending together as they surge and swell through the people. It is the sight of that power for good that you need. I cannot give it to you. You must sink your own shaft for it. It is this beneficent current passing from man to man that makes the unity of all efforts for public betterment. You have a movement and an excitement over bad water, and it leaves you with kindergartens in your schools. It is this current that turns your remark at the club (which every one repeated in order to injure you) into a piece of encouragement to the banker’s clerk, who could not have made it himself except at the cost of his livelihood. It is this current--not only the fear of it, but the presence of it--in the heart of your merchants that leaves them at your mercy. Cast anything into this current and it goes everywhere, like aniline dye put into a reservoir; it tinges the whole local life in twenty-four hours. It is to this current that all appeals are made. All party platforms, all resolutions, all lies are dedicated to it; all literature lives by it. The head of power is near and easy if you strike directly for it.
There is an opinion abroad that good politics requires that every man should give his whole time to politics. This is another of the superstitions disseminated by the politicians who want us to go to their primaries, and accepted by people so ignorant of life that they believe that the temperature depends upon the thermometer.
Why, you are running those primaries now. If you were different, they would become different. You need never go near them. Go into that camp where your instinct leads you. The improvement in politics will not be marked by any cyclonic overturn. There will always be two parties competing for your vote. It takes no more time to vote for a good man than for a bad man. There will be no more men in public life then than now. There will be no overt change in conditions. A few leaders will stand for the new forces. It is true that it requires a general increase of interest on the part of every one, in order that these men shall be found. Your personal duty is to support them in private and public. That is all. The extent to which you yourself become involved in public affairs depends upon chances with which you need not concern yourself. Only try to understand what is happening under your eyes. Every time you see a group of men advancing some cause that seems sensible, and being denounced on all hands as “self-appointed,” see if it was not something in yourself, after all, that appointed those men.
As we grow old, what have we to rely on as a touchstone for the times? You once had your own causes and enthusiasms, but you cannot understand these new ones. You had your certificate from the Almighty, but these fellows are “self-appointed.” What you wanted was clear, but these men want something unattainable, something that society, as you know it, cannot supply. Calm yourself, my friend; perhaps they bring it.
Has the great Philosophy of Evolution done nothing for the mind of man, that new developments, as they arrive, are received with the same stony solemnity, are greeted with the same phrases as ever? How can you have the ingenuousness to argue soberly against me, supplying me, by every word you say, with new illustrations, new hope, new fuel? Until I heard you repeat word by word the prayer-book of crumbling conservatism, I was not sure I was right. You have placed the great seal of the world upon new truth. Thus should it be received.
The radicals are really always saying the same thing. They do not change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality, want of humor, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearance nobody follows them, yet every one believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honored pitch is G flat. The community cannot get that A out of its head. Nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone so long as the real A is kept sounding. Every now and then the whole town strikes it for a week, and all the bells ring, and then all sinks to suppressed discord and denial.
The reason why we have not, of late years, had strong consistent centres of influence, focuses of steady political power, has been that the community has not developed men who could hold the note. It was only when the note made a temporary concord with some heavy political scheme that the reform leaders could hear it themselves. For the rest of the time it threw the whole civilization out of tune. The terrible clash of interests drowned it. The reformers themselves lost it, and wandered up and down, guessing.
It is imagined that nature goes by jumps, and that a whole community can suddenly sing in tune, after it has been caterwauling and murdering the scale for twenty years. The truth is, we ought to thank God when any man or body of men make the discovery that there is such a thing as absolute pitch, or absolute honesty, or absolute personal and intellectual integrity. A few years of this spirit will identify certain men with the fundamental idea that truth is stronger than consequences, and these men will become the most serious force and the only truly political force in their community. Their ambition is illimitable, for you cannot set bounds to personal influence. But it is an ambition that cannot be abused. A departure from their own course will ruin any one of them in a night, and undo twenty years of service.
It would be natural that such sets of men should arise all over the country, men who “wanted” nothing, and should reveal the inverse position of the Boss System; a set of moral bosses with no organizations, no politics; men thrown into prominence by the operation of all the forces of human nature now suppressed, and the suppression of those now operative. It is obvious that one such man will suffice for a town. In the competition of character, one man will be naturally fixed upon, whom his competitors will be the first to honor; and upon him will be condensed the public feeling, the confidence of the community. If the extreme case do not arise, nevertheless it is certain that the tendencies toward a destruction of the present system, will reveal themselves as a tendency making for the weight of personal character in practical politics.
Reform politics is, after all, a simple thing. It demands no great attainments. You can play the game in the dark. A child can understand it. There are no subtleties nor obscurities, no higher analysis or mystery of any sort. If you want a compass at any moment in the midst of some difficult situation, you have only to say to yourself, “Life is larger than this little imbroglio. I shall follow my instinct.” As you say this, your compass swings true. You may be surprised to find what course it points to. But what it tells you to do will be practical agitation.
III
THE MASSES
Let us examine current beliefs on popular education, and then thereafter let us look very closely at the work done among the poor, and see upon what lines it has been found possible to establish influence.
Why is it that if you go down to the Bowery and set up a kindergarten or give a course of lectures on the Duties of Citizenship, every one commends you; whereas if you go into some abandoned district where a Tammany thug is running for the State Assembly against a Republican heeler, and if you put an honest man in the field against them both, your friends call you a fool, and say that your reform consists of mere negation?
Who asks to see the results upon the public welfare of a night school in astronomy? Yet, if you get ten mechanics to labor for six months with the fire of enthusiasm in them, building up a radical club, and as a result, one hundred and fifty men cast for the first time in their lives a vote that represents the heart and conscience of each, your intelligent friends ask, “What have you done? You are howling against the moon.”
Why is it that if you are a grocer and refuse to sand your sugar, you are called honest? Yet, if a young politician takes this course, it is supposed that life is not long enough for the world to discover his value; he is a visionary. In the sugar trade, the man insisted upon dealing with the community as a whole. He was not trying to sell sugar to a club, or to benefit some district. He dealt with the public. Now, if a politician deals directly with the public, we condemn him because we cannot see the empire of confidence he is building up. The reason we do not see it is entirely due to historical causes. We have had little experience recently in the utility of large appeals. We forget their power. Yet we are not without examples. Grover Cleveland dealt directly with the people on a great scale. He established a personal relation that was stronger than party bonds. This made him President, preserved his character and gave reality to politics. It was a bit of education to every man in the United States to see what riff-raff our political arks were made of: a man laid his hand on the end of one of them and tore off the roof.
We are rather more familiar with the power of public confidence as seen in times of revolution. In the year of the Lexow investigation the people of New York City believed that Dr. Parkhurst and John Goff were in earnest. There was a period of a few weeks when Goff exercised the powers of a dictator. The Police Commissioners had threatened to discipline a subordinate who had testified before Goff’s committee. He subpoenaed them all the next morning, and he browbeat them like school-boys. They went back humbled. The revelations of the summer had awakened the spirit of revolt in the masses of the people, and it expressed itself directly as power. The machinery of government was not in abeyance, but it was seen to be a mere vehicle. It could be made to work justice. Here were two men, Goff and Parkhurst, rendered all-powerful by the existence of popular confidence. The state of mind of the community was unusual, and the indignation soon subsided; but it subsided to a new level, and the abuses and inhumanity of Boss tyranny have never since been so severe in New York.
Our people have seen several volcanic eruptions of this sort, and therefore they believe in them. They believe in the moral power of the community, but are afraid it can only act by convulsion. They think that some new principle comes into play at such times, something which is not a constant factor in daily government. On the other hand, we have all been trained to respect plodding methods in common education, and we know that much can be done by kindergartens, boys’ clubs, and propaganda to change the standards of the community and make men trust virtue. We believe in the boys’ club, and we believe in the earthquake; we forget that the same principle underlies them both. When some one applies this principle to the field of political education that lies between them, we are cynical because we have no experience.
Apart from the lack of experience that prevents people from seeing the use of this practical activity, there are two distressing elements that make men not want to see it. In the first place, even if you work in the Bowery and a friend votes in Harlem, you are apt to be hitting his interests and prejudices. And in the second place your conduct is a horrid appeal. If this work is useful, he ought to be doing it. He had hoped that nothing could be done.
The real distinction between this particular sort of work and other philanthropy is, that other philanthropy is preparatory drill; this is war. The other is feeding, training, and preaching; this is practice. Now, you may have your license to preach all you please in the vineyard, but if you touch the soil with the spade, you find the ground is pre-empted; you are fighting a railroad. And this condition is openly recognized in cities where the evil forces are completely dominant.
In lecturing before the University Extension in Pennsylvania, you are not allowed to talk politics. It is against the policy of the philanthropists who run the institution, and who are run by the railroad. The situation in Philadelphia is merely illustrative of the distinction between philanthropy and political reform, which is always ready to become apparent. Of course, so long as the railroad distributes the philanthropy, there will result nothing but tyranny. The Roman Emperors gave shows to amuse the people, and we give them talks on Botticelli and magic-lantern pictures of the Nile. There are, then, real reasons why our people are slow to acknowledge the utility of militant political reform, and why they clutch at any handle against it.
But we have much more to learn from the philanthropists by a study of what they have done than by dwelling on their shortcomings. They have labored while the political reformers have slept; and after many trials and many failures they have found certain working principles.
It was they who discovered that we cannot, as human nature is constituted, give strength to any one except by helping the whole man to develop at once. We must give him a chance to grow. The workers among the poor have long ago seen the futility of any effort except that of raising the general standards of living. They have established Settlements, where the relation between the settlers and the surrounding population is as natural as family life and as perennial as Tammany Hall. After ten years of experiment this has been done in many places. If you will go to one of these places and study exactly what has happened in the line of benefit to the people, you will see that it has resulted _wholly_ from personal influence,--that is to say, from the effect of character upon character. “Two years ago we established a boys’ club, and soon afterwards a kindergarten. The boys returned one day, and out of jealousy smashed everything belonging to the kindergarten, and piled the rubbish in the middle of the room. Last week a barrel of fruit was sent here for the sick and weakly, and we left the barrel open with a card on the outside to that effect. You could not get the boys to touch the fruit. Now, if you ask me what system or what part of the system has caused the change in these boys, I don’t know.”
This is reform politics, but unless you and I go there and make a place for these boys in practical politics, they will find waiting for them nothing but the caucus and the job. They will relapse and forget. It is throwing effort into the sea to train the young if you stop there. The test comes when the scaffoldings of early life are taken down. Each man meets the world alone. The tragedies of character occur at this period. We must make a camp and standing ground for grown men. So far as the hope of political purity goes, there are acres of this city that are in a worse condition than health was in before the era of hospitals. Fly over them as the crow flies, and you cannot find a centre of downright antagonism to evil. The population does not know that such a thing exists; and yet, if you propose to go there and set up a fight against both parties,--that is to say, a fight against wickedness,--you are told by patriots and doctors of divinity, “Don’t do it unless you can win. You will disgust people with reform.”
It is awful and at the same time ludicrous to hear an educated person maintain this doctrine and in the same breath mourn over the corruption of the masses. The man throws his own dark shadow over them and bewails their want of light. He doubts the power of personal influence; and yet there is absolutely no other force for good in the world, and never has been. Let us stick to facts. Take individual cases of improvement and see what power has been at work. You will find that you disclose behind any personal improvement, not a ballot law or an organization, but a human being.
The movement for political reform goes into the Bowery in the wake of the philanthropists. We go there knowing something about practical politics. We know, for instance, that the Bowery is the geographical name for a district which is really governed by the same forces as Fifth Avenue. To think that the politics of the Bowery are controlled by the Bowery is about as sensible as to believe that the politics of Irkutsk are controlled at Irkutsk. We have got, first, to disclose the machinery of evil and then to fight it wherever we find it, even though it lead us into churches. Nothing is needed in any Tammany club on the Bowery that is not needed ten times as much in the Union League Club on Fifth Avenue--personal self-sacrifice for principle in a cause which is apparently hopeless. Unless you go there displaying that, you are not needed.
Our intercourse with the laboring man is a great teacher to ourselves. That is its main use. It brings out, as nothing else can, the magnitude and perfection of the system, whose visible top and little flag we can always see, but whose dimensions and ramifications nothing but experiment can reveal; philosophy could not guess it.
Here is a laborer on the street railroad. In order to get work he must show a ticket from the party boss. It is his passport from the Czar, countersigned by the proper official; otherwise he gets no job. Here is a young notary whom you employ to carry about the certificate that puts an independent candidate in nomination. You try to get him to sign the thing himself and join your club. It is no use asking. His brother did it once and lost his place; so close is the scrutiny, so rapid the punishment. Examine the retail grocer, or the tobacconist, or the cobbler; go into particulars with him, and you will find that his unwillingness to join your movement does not spring so directly from his inability to see the point of it, as from fear of the direct and immediate consequences to himself.
We wanted to elevate the masses, but it turns out, as the philanthropists discerned long ago, that there are no masses in America, there are no masses in New York City. We can discover only individuals, who are each controlled by individual interests, by various and subtle considerations. These men are in chains to other men, who often live in other parts of the city.
The attorneys and merchants, the business world in fact, is found to be in league with abuse. The man who signs the laborer’s license to work reports twice a day to a big contractor who is director in a bank whose president owns the opera house and endowed the sailors’ home. He built the yacht club, is vestryman in the biggest church, and is revered by all men. The title-deeds and registry books of all visible wealth, show the names of his intimate friends. All we can do in the way of weakening the chains is to expose them; this cruelty is largely ignorance. The beneficiaries must be made to see the sources of their wealth. It is pre-occupation with business, not coldness of heart, that conceals the conditions. The American business man is a warm-hearted being. He does not even care for money, but for the game of business.
As matters now stand in America, we see this condition,--that it is for the immediate interest of the dominant class, namely, the politico-financial class, to keep the people as selfish as possible. We have examined the subtle strains of influence and prejudice by which this commercial interest has been extended, until, as a practical matter, it is almost impossible for a man to get word to the laboring classes that there exists such a thing as political morality. Some professional philanthropist always stands ready to prevent the signal of honesty from being raised; some set of Sunday citizens interposes to stop the unwise, inexpedient, foolhardy attempt to be independent of rascality.
And when you do succeed in reaching the mechanic, what can you do for him? Tell him to be a man, and strike off the shackles that bind him.
Here we are, as helpless before the poor as before the rich, facing both of them with the same query, “Can you not see that your own concession, call it poverty, or call it poverty of will, is one element of this oppression?”
The difference between the poor and the financial classes is one of spiritual complexity. The promoters are well-to-do because their minds have been able to grasp and utilize the complex forces made up of the minds of their simpler fellow-beings. And this astuteness leaves them less open to unselfish emotions than the laboring man. His nature is more intact. He is a more emotional and instinctive being. It is for this reason that moral reforms have come from the lower strata of society. The people have as much to lose as the bankers, but they are more ready to lose it.