Part 13

But there is something more than Mr. Bryan's thirty million (estimated) friends to keep the President harmonious with him. He is very considerably harmonious in spirit and political desires with the President. They have a very inclusive identity of general purpose. Mr. Bryan is as heartily in favor of the New Freedom as Mr. Wilson is. That is a kind of political religion in which both of them have profound faith. What truly religious people differ about, as a general thing, is not the controlling facts of their faith, but less essential matters; side issues, and very often errors. Catholics and Protestants have always agreed as to the main and really important facts of Christianity, but they have fought ferociously about processes, mechanisms and details. Free silver was a detail of politics. Mr. Bryan led his faction into the wilderness about that. Government ownership of railroads is another detail; state insurance of bank deposits is another. Mr. Bryan has an unsurpassed gift of getting it wrong on his details, but in his great general aim to keep the great body of people free from domination by the strong hands he is probably sound and sincere. It must be that that has saved him alive. He is a bold man with a large voice and the habit of domination. He hates bosses who are in politics for purposes of plunder; he hates all the agencies that seem to him to purpose to monopolize the people's heritage--trusts because he thinks they want to monopolize business, "Wall Street" because he thinks it wants to monopolize money, Ryan and Tammany because he thinks they want to monopolize and commercialize politics. Of course Mr. Bryan is interested in Bryan, and is heartily for that statesman, but he seems also to be quite heartily for human liberty, the rights of man, peace in the world, and the greatest happiness of the most people. It really looks as if he cared so much for these perennial enthusiasms as to be willing if they cannot come through himself, to help them come through someone else. And it looks as though he thought they might come considerably through Mr. Wilson, and was working to make them do it. Mr. Bryan's ethics are good enough. It is his economics that have made the trouble. He behaves as if at last he had found someone who could show him how to do what he wanted done. He seems to see in Mr. Wilson a man who is moving in the direction he wants to go and knows the road. He never before had leadership of that kind offered to him. All the other eminent Democratic guides whom he has been invited to support have seemed to him to be merely persons who knew the road to something he wished to avoid.

Confidence is a great harmonizer. If you think a man is going your way and knows the road better than you do, it is no great hardship to go along with him. The chief result that has come to notice of the fermentation, so far, in President Wilson's cabinet is an impression of profound confidence of the cabinet in the President. So far as heard from, they all seem to feel that he is going their way and either knows the road or can find it. It will be recalled that at Princeton Mr. Wilson was not so successful in winning the confidence of his advisers. That was because a certain proportion of them were not going his way. It has come to be recognized that he is of no use to anybody who is not going in the same general direction as he is. He will stop and talk; will persuade if he can; will wait if necessary, but he seems to have a prejudice against deviation that reminds one of Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress. You may pave a road with gold bricks; grade it, smooth it, dust it; it will never look attractive to Mr. Wilson unless it leads where he wants to go. That is the impression he makes,--an impression of a stubborn man very tenacious of purposes very well thought out. One laughs to think of the heads that are still sore with trying to butt him out of his course at Princeton; of his rapid extrication of his interests from political ties the most intimate and useful, that threatened to give an impression that his feet were intangled! One laughs to think of the _World_ a few months ago using its editorial megaphone to order him to discharge three members of his cabinet. It is doubtful if the _World_ would be so ready with that kind of suggestion to-day.

Nine months of fermentation have left the cabinet considerably clarified. We begin to think of it less as an aggregation of individuals, and more as a team bent on putting over certain definite accomplishments in government. It seems united in spirit; a team of willing workers under a captain in whom they have not only confidence, but pride. It was expected that Mr. Wilson would be hard to work with. It was expected that his defect as an executive officer would be an inability to enlist the sympathy of his colleagues and subordinates. People said he had no magnetism, that he was over suspicious and distrustful: that he would not dare to tie up to anyone, and that no one would dare to tie up to him. But, so far, these expectations do not find much support; in fact, so far as anybody knows, his cabinet is an unusually happy family. Men are working with tireless devotion to make his administration succeed. They are doing so not so much because they like the man (though they do like him) as because they like the cause. They follow him, support him, help him, advise him, defer to his judgment, because he has impressed them with the notion that he knows what he is about, and is equal to what he undertakes and that under his leadership certain definite improvements in the social and economic apparatus of our country may be accomplished.

Soldiers love a general not because of how he parts his hair, but because he can win battles. President Wilson has produced the impression that he can win battles. It is that that interests him; not the buttons on his coat, nor to have the people holler when they see him. He cannot win any battle without plenty of help. How does he get the help? Is it by close attention to details of deportment?

Not at all. His deportment is agreeable so far as known, but it does not seem to be his chief concern.

Is it by extreme solicitude to avoid small mistakes and ingratiate all influential persons?

No. He makes his share of small mistakes and sometimes scandalizes the influential, but it does not seem to matter.

He gets help because he seems to be worth helping; because he gives his mind not to the retention of power, but to the use of it in accomplishing what he was chosen to accomplish. He has signed a tariff bill. That was one great battle won. He had to have splendid support to win it, but he got the support. Has he rested on that victory? Not a minute. Now it is the currency bill and it will be that until he signs a currency bill that will satisfy the country. Then it will be the trusts, and the Lord knows what.

But it is safe to bet that Mr. Wilson also knows what. He has thought out a great many problems of government. He will always know of things that ought to be done to improve the life of the people, and he will always have a program for doing the next thing on his list, and will always push it as hard as seems to him practicable and, probably, much harder than will seem expedient to most observers. He has shown himself to be a great driving force, and the kind of one that gains ground because of the forces that he can carry with him. What he is after will always be as clear as he can make it, and it will be important, and those that are for it will be confident that they will get it if they win, and those that are against it will know what they are against. There is a good prospect for clean political and economic issues in this country for some time to come; issues about which people will have to think, and on which they will divide. The question is going to be how much improvement the country can stand in a given time. The patient is on the operating table. No doubt he needs to have a good deal done, but if his pulse begins to sink, off he will have to come, and wait until he gets stronger. Otherwise the disposition is to make a new man of him and do it now.

And so, small matters are not going to make so much difference as they might if less important changes were imminent. It may be true that the trousers of all the cabinet bag at the knees, but nobody cares much. Mr. Bryan may talk in the Chautauqua circuit, and do lots of other unusual things, Mr. McAdoo's department may make mistakes in its income-tax circulars, Mr. Daniels may behave at times too much like Mr. Daniels, Mr. McReynolds's young men may show a too voluble zeal in prosecution, but it will be a mistake to expand occurrences of that size into evidences of administrative failure. Cromwell had a wart on his nose, but still was esteemed an efficient man. His trousers would undoubtedly have bagged at the knees if he had worn trousers, but his statue stands at last by the Parliament House in London.

President Wilson's administration is likely to win or lose on wagers of considerable size. It may be a good administration or it may be a bad one, but there is no sign or symptom that it is going to be a piker.

A NEEDED UNPOPULAR REFORM

The American people in their frugal rural days enjoyed their freedom, knew all their neighbors, and governed themselves simply and directly. They knew personally the men they elected. Now bosses govern them, and the men they elect are unknown to the voters. The republic is rich, the people are many. Still possessed of that spirit of liberty which Edmund Burke noted as characteristic of the American colonists, and still reaching for complete self-government, they have grasped too much, and have lost their grip on what is essential. They have seen the setting up of secret oligarchies in all the chief cities and states. The head of the most considerable of these oligarchies, regnant save in times of extraordinary protest and agitation, is virtually king of a tributary city and state, whose population is over thrice that of the original thirteen Colonies, whose public expenditures are three hundred millions of dollars yearly, and whose wealth amounts to twenty-five billions. He and his associates, too, partake of this fierce American spirit, in the sense that they are strong individualists. And they are captains of a peculiar industry.

The fathers foresaw this danger to the republic. Judah Hammond says that Washington, before the close of his second term, "rebuked self-creative societies from an apprehension that their ultimate tendency would be hostile to the public tranquillity." The members of the Society of Tammany, who were then celebrating its eighth birthday, "supposed their institution to be included in the reproof, and they almost all forsook it." But the organization's founder, William Mooney, and a few with him, made Aaron Burr their leader, and he and his friend Matthew L. Davis forged it and tempered it into an instrument of perpetual and public plunder.

It was inevitable that there should be "self-creative societies" in the United States devoted to the political preferment and personal emolument of their members. It accorded with the genius of a people who wished, above all things, individually to be let alone in their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Vast natural possessions must be explored and exploited. The victorious new nation was engaged in ravaging a bountiful land and in despoiling its savage possessors. To the spirit of liberty which its citizens inherited as Englishmen and as sons of dissidence and protestantism, was added a contagion of wildness from their redskin foes. The "Burrites" paraded in Indian garb, danced, and used savage ceremonies. The climate, changeable and stimulating, and the conditions of the time, charged with the possibilities of material and political conquest, had bred desperate leaders differing from the patriots who headed the societies of the Revolution. These leaders naturally opposed the party of Alexander Hamilton, with its suggestions of a responsible, centralized, and controlling government. The Society of old Tamenund welcomed Aaron Burr into its wigwam after he slew Hamilton. It shielded its founder, Mooney, after he was convicted for stealing "wampum," or "trifles for Mrs. Mooney," from New York City's supplies. It acclaimed Benjamin Romaine as its Grand Sachem, after his removal in 1806 from the City Controllership for malfeasance. Abraham Stagg, political ancestor of Charles F. Murphy, continued to get the contracts for paving the city's streets after his conviction, in 1808, of concealing accounts as Collector of Assessments. Tammany's braves assaulted the City Hall in 1815 and removed the Mayor, DeWitt Clinton, who was the honest and better prototype of William Sulzer; but Clinton later repelled their attack on him as Governor. Under Matthew Davis they had early perfected their mode of raiding the primaries that they might consequently raid the City Treasury, and in 1800 their manipulations actually resulted in the election of President Jefferson. Their councils were so crafty that by 1816 they were ruling New York by a committee of fourteen chieftains. In his excellent history of Tammany Hall, Gustavus Myers says:

Substantially, fourteen men were acting for over five thousand Republican voters, and eight members of the fourteen composed a majority. Yet the system had all the pretence of a pure democracy; the wards were called upon to elect delegates; the latter chose candidates and made party rules; and the "great popular meeting" accepted or rejected nominees; it all seemed to spring directly from the people.

Thus early was formed the perfect and predatory "system" which typifies the oligarchies that have acquired control of the American states and cities. Their forays and assaults have been continuous through more than a century. Now and then a warrior, chief, or Sachem has been captured with his booty and punished. Such were the cases of the treasury stealings by Ruggles Hubbard and John L. Broome in 1817; of Jacob Barker and his fellow Sachems in the bank frauds of 1826; of the procurement of legislative charters by bribery in 1834, involving Peter Betts and Luke Metcalfe; of the lobbying by Samuel Swartout for the Harlem Railroad in 1835, and his defalcations in 1838; of the Manhattan Bank's lendings to Tammany leaders in 1840; of the gambler Rynders and the Empire Club scandal in 1844; of the sales of nominations under Fernando Wood in 1846, and the Council of the "Forty Thieves" in 1851; of the extortions for ferry leases and railroad franchises in 1854; of the election frauds of 1857, and so on, down to the monumental thieveries of "Boss" Tweed and his "ring," exposed in 1871, the death of "Honest" John Kelly in 1886, the rise of Richard Croker in 1890, who testified that he worked "for his pocket all the time," and to Murphy, who in 1913 displayed the supreme power of Tammany by bringing about the removal of William Sulzer from the Governorship for disobeying the "invisible government." These exposures merely punctuate a long history of sustained and systematic plunder, for a parallel with which we must go back to the times of the Medici and the oligarchy they reared above the fabric of the Florentine republic.

But the rule of thieves, corruptionists, and "machine" men, which must be acknowledged as nearly universal in the United States, a rule which makes it impossible for the people to select their own candidates for office, and usually dictates the elections, is strangely the price the public pays for social and economic freedom. It was the intent of the founders that the people should control their own government. The founders made it as nearly a pure democracy as they dared. The charters of American cities and the constitutions of the states reveal long lists of elective offices. The statutes define strictly the duties of officials; their terms are made short, and through the multitude of offices, important and petty, it is clear that one purpose runs to make each directly answerable to the voters. In every quadrennial cycle the voters of New York City engage in the election of over five hundred incumbents of offices, state and municipal. Tickets with candidates for thirty offices in a single election are of normal length, and between the rival candidates on four or five such tickets each voter is expected intelligently to make his selection. If he makes it intelligently, the officials elected will be fit; if he understands their duties, and can spare time to watch their conduct while he observes the behavior of several score other officials whose terms have not yet expired, he can punish those who are unfaithful, and reward those who show themselves worthy of public trust. But to carry on an efficient government in this way, most of the voters would have to leave their private pursuits, abandon the opportunities of a great and rich country, and give their minds chiefly to the complex administrations of all the public offices. Will they do it? Can they?

The voters, the least and most intelligent of them, all know that it is impracticable to leave their private pursuits, to which they devote time and energy unsparingly, and attend in this way to the government. The very method the people have provided to secure the offices under their direct control defeats its purpose by the amount of work and study it entails. No owner of a large business establishment would pretend that he could judge the qualifications of _all_ his employees and know their work, yet this ability to assure good service in the great business establishment of government, is presumed in every voter. The presumption is as distinguished for its foolishness as for its age. It has not been well founded in a century, during which time it has been repeatedly proved false. Most elections go by default. Excepting in the cases of a few conspicuous candidates, about whom the public can make itself informed, and in small communities where everyone knows his neighbor and the men in petty offices, the electorate obeys mechanically the dictates of political leaders.

The notion of having most offices elective, originated, of course, in the practice of the old New England town meetings. But as the towns grew into cities, and these increased in population, the public works expanded, public interests and activities became complex, and the number of offices and instruments of government was multiplied, each with its peculiar responsibilities. The private concerns of the voters, likewise, acquired a complexity that made extra demands on their attention, and the trades and professions became specialized. The people could no longer rule themselves by any method resembling that of the town meeting. As they developed their unexampled opportunities, their eyes were diverted from the multitude of public offices, and the plunderers came in.

The politicians were devoted. They dedicated the time the voters could not spare to holding together the complicated public machinery. The people could not very well go to the primaries; that should be the business of the bosses, their bread and butter. They do their work at least zealously. They are called traitors and plunderers, many hate them, but perforce everybody tolerates them, and the states and cities under the present system cannot do without them. Their low organizations, their dives and groggeries, their gangs of "floaters" and intimidators of voters, their levyings of tribute, their control of men in high places, their sales of power and patronage, and their gigantic thefts and corruption show only in its perverse working that fierce individualistic spirit which is in freer play here and now among all ranks of men, and in all pursuits, than elsewhere in the world during the course of human history.

To say that the influence of such men, self-constituted governors of the public for their own private interest, has been pernicious beyond their immediate stealings and "honest graft," would be saying too little. The people in their local governments, which are closer to their lives and in the aggregate more important than the national government, have not had the equal protection of the laws. Under the bosses, legislatures were for sale, and sold. The corporations got their public franchises by bribery. Vast insurance funds were juggled in speculation. The necessaries of life were monopolized. Wholesale adulteration of foods and medicines was permitted. Refrigerated meats were kept for higher prices until ptomaines were produced. Unsafe buildings were erected. The boss, in whose power was the enforcement of laws, could instruct the aldermen or the legislators not to appropriate money for their enforcement. He could bargain for the passage of unwise or oppressive statutes, and he could instruct judges, appointed to their candidacies by him, how to interpret them. Had his influence extended only to the heads of lawless trusts, it might have been less dangerous than it was and is. But it was pervasive, it infected the common people. They saw the laws unequally administered, and a general contempt for law was bred. Dr. Fritz Reichmann, Superintendent of Weights and Measures at Albany, recently calculated that petty tradesmen cheated New York's consumers with short measures by at least $10,000,000 yearly. Raids upon the small groceries and shops of Greater New York during a reform administration, disclosed false weights and measures in the majority of them. Here was evidence that the fabric of the body politic had been warped and wrenched from the standards of individual rectitude.

Fortunately, signs are not lacking of what has been called a great moral awakening. Taking advantage of the Federal system at Washington, which is based upon the theory that the boss shall be selected by the people and placed in the Presidency by them, appointing heads of all the subordinate offices, the people have through the Presidents caused the dissolution of great monopolies, and have made the business of captaining industries by unfair means disreputable. The industrial captains are no longer satisfied with their material gains. They want the respect of their fellows. They are reforming their bad companies or forsaking them, and are devoting their wealth to public ends. One of the states has greatly aided in this change, and its example is instructive. New Jersey, the "home of the trusts," notorious throughout the world for its fathering of monopolies, is in all but its legislature a "short ballot" state. The legislators are elected at large by counties; the ballot is long in the thickly populated urban counties, and the unfair representation of the rural counties unites with the city bosses to control the law-making power, usually, also, dictating the nominations for Governor. But the Governorship of New Jersey is practically the only office to be filled by the people's vote. Like the President at Washington the Governor appoints his own cabinet and the rest of the state's executive and judicial officers. New Jersey's pre-eminence as the home of the trusts was gained after the nomination of Governor after Governor by the bosses.