Part 6

Brookfield, a contemporary whose line is education, has been telling me a story about a rich man, named Thompson, who has got interested in the improvement of mankind. Somebody said the other day that the men who get rich are those who are able to get more out of other people than other people get out of them. That is a very plausible definition and good as far as it goes, but the story I heard made me realize that it doesn’t cover all the ground, and that many rich men are creators of wealth. This Thompson that I heard of had extraordinary brains for business. He could think to the bottom of propositions, and think out all their details and perceive whether they could be made profitable and how. He got at business almost as young as Alexander Hamilton, for his parents, who were good people, both died when he was fifteen and left him, as you might say, with his hat on, going out to look for means of support. He went to a big town and got a job with a good concern. At the end of three years he was ill, probably from overwork. His employer told him to go away and stay two months and get rested. He went, and stayed six weeks, and came back with the biggest bunch of orders that the firm had ever had. His employer saw then that he was incorrigible, and pretty soon he took him into partnership.

Now there comes another likeness to Hamilton. The boy wanted to know more, and determined that when he had got money enough he would quit work and go off and study. He calculated that he would have a million dollars by the time he was twenty-six, and he thought that would do. He actually did get his million and something to spare at twenty-six (and this is not a newspaper story, either; Brookfield told it to me), and actually did pull out and go off to Europe and spent three years in France and Germany improving his mind. Now comes in his gift of celibacy, in which he was quite different from Hamilton--who never had any discernible talent that way--and from me. Instead of getting married and raising a family, and having a flower-garden and horses and cows--this being before they had invented automobiles--and enjoying life, he did not get married at all. I don’t know why not. Maybe he didn’t know how and was too old to learn; maybe somebody else persuaded the girl that he aspired to persuade. At any rate, he didn’t marry, but came home and made lots more money, and finally retired from active business and set his wits to see what he could do to make the world better. Now he lives on twelve or fifteen thousand a year, and spends most of his strength and his surplus income and more or less of his principal chiefly on one considerable enterprise that combines philanthropy and education. But he is dragged back into business now and then, Brookfield told me, when a commercial rescue job offers, that looks so difficult that nobody else will touch it.

Of course, celibacy has no particular bearing on Thompson’s usefulness except that he was qualified to get along with it, and it left him entirely free to spend himself in trying to better the general conditions of life. It is not news that there are always some mighty useful bachelors about. Still less is it news that there are many indispensable spinsters. I suppose the sentiment that everybody must get married and have four children has got some open seams in it; but a life is the thing that folks like best to leave in the world, and with reason, for, on the whole, a life, if it is good enough, lasts the best of anything, and leaves the most imperishable effects.

It is too soon yet to say if my son Samuel is going to leave an imperishable effect in the world, but he is doing well, and the more perishable effects have already been found to be so little suited to him that one of his grandmothers has given him a modern rag-doll--an elegant creation that comes from a shop--and the other a teddy-bear. Teddy-bears are scarcer in the toy shops than they were, because the current of politics has rolled on, but they can still be had and may yet become more plentiful. Samuel lives a care-free life. In that respect he is an example and encouragement to us all. He assumes no responsibility about anything, takes his nourishment without turning a hair or sweating so much as one bead, and shows indifference to the primal curse. It is cheering and strengthening to have such a spirit in the family.

Ben Bowling, who came home with me to dinner the other night, has some of Samuel’s quality. Ben likes life and does not care what happens. I threatened him with universal prohibition and the total disappearance of potable grog from Christendom. He said it would never happen so, but if it did he didn’t care. He drank too much, anyhow, and if there was nothing to drink it would be good for his health and save him lots of money. I threatened him with woman suffrage. He refused even to object; said checkers was still checkers after all the pieces had got into the king-row, and as good a game as ever, though with differences of detail. I threatened him with stagnation of all industrial activity as the result of enforcing the Sherman law. He didn’t care; said he worked too hard, anyway, and needed a rest; could eat very simple food at a pinch; was too fat; was threatened with an unsuitable entanglement of the affections, and might escape the bag if the times were hard enough. Then we all talked about the Sherman law. I see in the papers that the consumption of alcoholic drinks in the United States last year was the greatest on record. No wonder, when you think how much the Sherman law has been talked over: a dry subject on which you get no further and sink into despondency unless buoyed up. It is funny to see the sagacity of the country flunked, apparently, by that problem. What Ben and I agree on is so, and we agreed that the Sherman law, grinding out prosecutions and disorganizing business because public opinion could not settle on any plan to improve or amend it, was not unlike the silver-purchase law that kept loading silver into the Treasury and scaring off gold until Cleveland finally got it repealed. We did not agree that the Sherman law ought to be repealed, but did agree that it might elect the next President. Also that neither party was satisfied with any one who was running for nomination, though that is perhaps not an unusual condition when nomination is still five or six months off. But Ben did not care. He was attentive, interested, and amused, but hoped to stay aboard, no matter what the weather was, and help in navigation if his services were required. He and Samuel are reassuring.

Another thing I find reassuring is the glimpses I get now and then of men who are at work providing government for the country; especially unadvertised men whom few people ever hear of, who hold no office and aspire to none; whose pictures are never in the papers, nor their names in the reporter’s books or the mouths of the multitude. I heard the other day about one such person (Brookfield told me), a man of sufficient fortune--a million, I dare say--not a celibate like Thompson, but married and with a few children; a shrewd, experienced, thoughtful man, whose interest in life is and always has been politics, to handle the machinery of it and get the best results compatible with the material offered to pass laws and fill the offices, and the prejudices and mental disabilities of the voters. “I have known that man,” Brookfield said, “for eighteen years, and watched him play politics all that time; plan and direct; weigh men and choose between them; use their talents and abilities when they had them: put them in places where they belonged when he could; put in the next-best man when he couldn’t. He always played fair; always wanted the best man, the best law, and the best principle that he could see, and never wanted anything for himself except the fun of playing the game. You couldn’t drive him into office. He never tried to make a penny out of legislation. The less he was seen and heard of the better he liked it, but he recognized politics as the great man’s game, and he liked to play it. No doubt the sense of power was pleasant to him, but his use of power was entirely conscientious, and the source of his power was never money, but the confidence that men had in his sagacity and his unselfishness. Back in him somewhere there was, of course, a sense of duty and a belief in certain principles of government, and a sort of unconscious consecration to the desire to see our experiment in government go well and to see the country prosper. But the immediate interest that kept his mind busy was just a delight in guiding the political affairs of men.”

I dare say Brookfield’s man is an exceptional political boss; but I dare say, also, that in so far as we have, or ever have had, or will have, decent government, we owe it to somebody who has had a call to provide it for us, and has had the talents necessary to make his call effective. The rare thing about Brookfield’s man, as he described him, was his self-effacement and superiority to vanity. He loved to play the game, but not only never thought of the gate money, but never cared to be a grandstand player. To do the job and do it well brought him the joy of a true artist in his art. As I said, I have felt encouraged about the future of politics in this country since I heard about him. If he had been a saint I wouldn’t have been so much encouraged, but Brookfield represented him as a mere human being, like any of us, looking about for things that interested his mind and made life taste good, and finding them supremely in politics. It is an encouragement to find that our politics is so good a game that folks with money and brains enough to experiment with pleasures will play at it purely for their inward satisfaction, and without attention even to the applause. Of course, men of that temperament and that high degree of sagacity and self-control are rare, but we have our share of men with an insight into cause and effect, and an understanding of the human mind both in the individual and in the crowd, and with ability to hear what is going on when they put their ears to the ground, and with a lively interest in human affairs that must surely draw them into politics whenever they see that politics is a paramount interest. We have no picturesque Dukes of Devonshire drudging dutifully at government without vanity or political ambition, as fathers drudge for their families, and as Washington, maybe, drudged for us, but I believe we have a native product of our own that does like work, and quite as often with intelligence, because the work calls to them and because they not only feel the responsibilities of civilization, but find delight in undertaking them.

And why not, to be sure! What else is there in life that is so fruitful in recompenses as a cheerful undertaking of the responsibilities of civilization? Mine are represented mainly, as yet, by Cordelia and Samuel, but I mean to undertake lots more. I see quantities of them about waiting to be undertaken. So does Cordelia, who is one of the most active and responsible of responsibilities, and, being less tied up to wage-earning than I am, gives more attention to putting props under civilization.

VI

POLITICS

My calling does not seem nowadays to inspire respect. Folks hoot at lawyers, declaring with much reiteration that law has ceased to be a profession and become a business. They vary that by pointing out that all the best talent in it is bought up day by day by the corporations and the rich. Even the judges--look at them! The current disposition is, when you don’t like a decision of a court, to take the judge’s number and write to the management to have him fired. It is to laugh at decisions and the feeling about them. The other day the United States Supreme Court decided something thus and so by four to three. Justices 1, 3, and 5 protested vigorously. Personally I sustained the dissenting opinion, and thought the decision left the law in a bad condition. That could be cured by Congress, which is perhaps the best way, but the popular method would be to dock Justices 2, 4, 6, and 7 a month’s pay, and try the case again with a full court. That’s how folks seem to feel, and perhaps some of them would act on their feelings.

_Some_ of them! Stars above! What some of us would do is past guessing. What some of us are thought capable of doing quite outruns belief, but that is because the air is charged with politics and with plans and specifications for making over the world, and with a perceptible leaning, as I have intimated, toward beginning with the legal profession.

Oh, well, let ’em! I’m not afraid. A man who can make a living by law can make a living at something else if necessary. It is the understanding when they put young fellows to learn the law that they will be qualified, more or less, if they learn it, not only to be lawyers, but to be bankers, brokers, railroad officers, editors, milliners, grocers, contractors, and nurses-general to ailing industries, and undertakers. Accordingly they usually appoint lawyers to receiverships, and usually the appointees go ahead and bury the patient. No doubt it is a natural consequence of this theory that lawyers shall know and do everybody’s business that there is this prevalence of impressions that everybody ought to be able to beat the lawyers at law. Of course there ought to be reciprocity in omniscience. Of course the lawyer trade can be overdone, but there’s more to it than these recall people think. I guess it will last my time. It’s the science of keeping order in the world. I admit that it needs assistance from cops and sometimes from soldiers, and cannon and warships, and that too much of the time it keeps a sort of crystallized disorder that has to be smashed occasionally and rearranged. But when it comes to rearrangement, back they come to the lawyers, professors of the science of keeping order in the world.

It is interesting how people divide in politics. All the decent people seem to be after the same thing, more or less, but differ according to knowledge, temperament, circumstances, and affiliations as to methods of getting it. And the differences last so wonderfully! There’s free trade and protection, or high and low protection--we’ve been discussing those matters in this country voluminously and insistently for from fifty to a hundred years, and by far the most of us don’t know now precisely where we stand. We are, reasonably enough, for as much improvement as will do us good, and not for any more than is helpful at the price. But tariff-improvement isn’t to be had in quarter-yard lengths. Congress makes a rough effort to please customers, and when it has finished it is take it or leave it, and the customers usually go off grumbling.

And the other things that people want--restraint of corporations, restraint of labor-unions, restraint of political bosses, changes in the machinery of politics, hand-made government by the people, single taxes, income taxes, minimum wages, municipal ownership of public utilities, votes for women--my gracious--there’s a new remedy every day.

Not but that many of them are good and some of them timely. The world seems to be progressive nowadays, and I suppose its progress is upward, and not to the bow-wows. But it is to wonder about every proposed change whether it is really improvement or merely change, and about every novelty that people clamor for whether their true need is not something else--a change in themselves, rather than any practicable change in the regulations of life. For one need not be very old to observe that different people make out very differently in the same circumstances, and that folks affect circumstances much more than circumstances affect folks. Yet circumstances do affect folks very much, crush them sometimes, and stunt or warp them often; and certainly there is an obligation in the folks who have it in them to affect circumstances to improve them for the benefit of all hands, and provide reasonable access to opportunity.

Do I get in with the cart-tail orators this campaign? Why not, to be sure? Politics has been an early crop this year, sprouting hard in March, and working overtime ever since, with an enormous profusion of discourse and a vast expenditure of time and money in a general public effort to get somewhere. But that’s all right. The crop is going to be worth the labor. This is really the first time the political school has been run wide open since Bryan’s first campaign, and that was sixteen years ago, a period that carries me clear back to Eton collars. Alas for me! I suppose I’m a sort of conservative. They ought to examine the blood and find out where people belong, and save us some of our mental struggles to discover it by cerebral analysis. I don’t know what’s in my blood, but when people are for scuttling the ship so as to get the boats out easier I always seem to be for some other plan. Now and then it’s necessary to scuttle. There was the everlasting French Revolution, where they blew up their ship, and in the long run made a good thing out of it. But that was an exceptionally rotten ship, and they had things fixed aboard so that the crew were too successfully separated from the grub--a feat that a large share of human ability seems always at work to accomplish, and which, when it is successfully pulled off, achieves a very penetrating and comprehensive quality of ruin. Perhaps it is the conservative molecules in my blood that makes me as much adverse to this detachment of the crew from the grub as I am to blowing up the ship. No true friend of navigation wants either of them.

I guess it’s more fun to be a meat-ax radical than a conservative. The ax-handle is a simple implement, and probably blisters the hands less than this eternal pulling on the sheets and throwing the wheel over. But we don’t really choose our line in politics. We take the steer we get from our inside, and which comes down to us, no doubt, from our forebears, along with the tendency to fat or lean, and variations in the adherence of hairs to our scalps. I dare say we are not as grateful as we should be to other persons whose molecular inheritance is different from ours for going their way and following their hereditary propensities, so that we can better and more helpfully follow ours. If we all got the same steer I dare say the ship would run aground. To avoid that there comes this variety of propensity, and also the great principle of reaction on inherited inclinations, which has always raised up from time to time such valuable and efficient revolutionaries. The pinch for the natural conservatives comes at times when conservatism has outrun its license and crystallized into a do-nothingness which is more dangerous than radicalism. Then the real conservatives like me, who always want to let things down easy, have to flop, and it is always a very nice matter to know just when to do it and what to flop to.

This is a pretty floppy year, no doubt about it. I’d give a penny to know whose cart-tail, if any, I should aspire to mount. Great din at this writing, and a handsome field of candidates, with leaders whom we have been contemplating for months, and putting on the scales and pulling off, and whose points we have reckoned and re-reckoned. And as it comes to the choice, how prevalent is dubiety of mind as to whether we shall get candidates for whom we want to vote! Was there ever such a lot of men put up for office? I read the papers, all varieties of them, and have been studying candidates hard now for three or four months, and begin to wonder how so many incompetent or unprincipled citizens have contrived to cheat the gallows and avoid all places of detention all these years. Not one of them has so much as been to jail as yet. I dare say they would pass even now as half-way decent men if they were not candidates. Perhaps we are too particular. I notice that a large proportion of the important work in the world has been done by pretty bad men: men, some of them, who would have been insufferable if they had not been indispensable. When things are in a bad-enough hole, the indispensable man has to be taken whether he is insufferable or not. But luckily we’re not up against it so hard as that. Nobody seems indispensable this year. Our world seems to me less tippy nowadays, blowing as it is at all its blow-holes, than it did six or seven years ago, when stocks were kiting and being kited, and everybody was consolidating, and every active person who wasn’t a syndicate or an underwriter of something was asking the way to those fashionable employments. We have blown off a lot of steam since then, and our safety-valves are all working pretty well; and, though they’re noisy, to me they don’t look dangerous. We must be patient with the candidates, and look sometimes on their bright sides. When we regard them all with discontent, it is too much like that common saying, “Why do women marry such men?” They marry the best in sight, and that’s all we can do about candidates. But, by George! the light that beats upon a throne is mere moonshine to the light that beats upon a candidate.

We shall see about the candidates, but just what we shall see beats me.

VII

WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION

We want to ask people to dinner--at least _I_ do--and do ask a good many, first and last, in spite of restricted space and our other restrictions. About four besides ourselves is our limit, and that’s a dinner-party. More often I bring home a man, or a married pair of our generation come in and bring new topics and points of view, and sometimes news, into our discourse. People seem willing enough to come to dinner if you have something to eat in the house and something to say. I sometimes wish we had more dinner-parties, but the doctrine of compensation comes in on that, for, I suppose, if we were rich enough to have people to dinner whenever we wanted, we would have to dine out the rest of the time, and the upshot of it would be that we would never have time to read up anything really good to say. But we do dine out considerably as it is, not only with our cherished relatives who regale us when occasion offers (and also when it doesn’t) with meat, drink, and affection, but also with our friends, both those who live somewhat near our economic plane and those who move and have beings in planes much more exalted and profuse.

For example, we dine sometimes with Major and Mrs. Brace, indulgent elders of whom I have so often spoken, and who, I think, are disposed to assume some restricted but affectionate responsibility for our successful progress through this vale of dues. We are on such terms with that family that Mrs. Brace has a habit of telephoning to Cordelia please to come and fill in at a dinner-party when a pair of guests give out at the last moment, which we do, when we can, with cheerfulness of spirit. Then the Major bestows little jobs of law business on me from time to time, and is apt to say “Come to dinner, and talk it over, and fetch Cordelia.” And then we talk other things over also, and maybe play auction bridge for an hour.