IV
Many complain that we Americans give too much time to politics, but there could be no safer outlet for that “added drop of nervous fluid” which Colonel Higginson found in us and turned over to Matthew Arnold for further analysis. No doubt many voices will cry in the wilderness before we reach the promised land. A people which has been fed on the Bible is bound to hear the rumble of Pharaoh’s chariots. It is in the blood to resent the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely. The winter evenings are long on the prairies, and we must always be fashioning a crown for Cæsar or rehearsing his funeral rites. No great danger can ever seriously menace the nation so long as the remotest citizen clings to his faith that he is a part of the governmental mechanism and can at any time throw it out of adjustment if it doesn’t run to suit him. He can go into the court-house and see the men he helped to place in office; or if they were chosen in spite of him, he pays his taxes just the same and waits for another chance to turn the rascals out.
Mr. Bryce wrote: “This tendency to acquiescence and submission; this sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement may be studied but cannot be turned, I have ventured to call the Fatalism of the Multitude.” It is, I should say, one of the most encouraging phenomena of the score of years that has elapsed since Mr. Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” appeared, that we have grown much less conscious of the crushing weight of the mass. It has been with something of a child’s surprise in his ultimate successful manipulation of a toy whose mechanism had baffled him that we have begun to realize that, after all, the individual counts. The pressure of the mass will yet be felt, but in spite of its persistence there are abundant signs that the individual is asserting himself more and more, and even the undeniable acceptance of collectivist ideas in many quarters helps to prove it. With all our faults and defaults of understanding,—populism, free silver, Coxey’s army, and the rest of it,—we of the West have not done so badly. Be not impatient with the young man Absalom; the mule knows his way to the oak tree!
Blaine lost Indiana in 1884; Bryan failed thrice to carry it. The campaign of 1910 in Indiana was remarkable for the stubbornness of “silent” voters, who listened respectfully to the orators but left the managers of both parties in the air as to their intentions. In the Indiana Democratic State Convention of 1910 a gentleman was furiously hissed for ten minutes amid a scene of wildest tumult; but the cause he advocated won, and the ticket nominated in that memorable convention succeeded in November. Within fifty years Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois have sent to Washington seven Presidents, elected for ten terms. Without discussing the value of their public services it may be said that it has been an important demonstration to our Mid-Western people of the closeness of their ties with the nation, that so many men of their own soil have been chosen to the seat of the Presidents; and it is creditable to Maine and California that they have cheerfully acquiesced. In Lincoln the provincial American most nobly asserted himself, and any discussion of the value of provincial life and character in our politics may well begin and end in him. We have seen verily that
“Fishers and choppers and ploughmen
Shall constitute a state.”
Whitman, addressing Grant on his return from his world’s tour, declared that it was not that the hero had walked “with kings with even pace the round world’s promenade”;—
“But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings,
Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois,
Ohio’s, Indiana’s millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front,
Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round world’s promenade,
Were all so justified.”
What we miss and what we lack who live in the provinces seem to me of little weight in the scale against our compensations. We slouch,—we are deficient in the graces,—we are prone to boast,—and we lack in those fine reticences that mark the cultivated citizen of the metropolis. We like to talk, and we talk our problems out to a finish. Our commonwealths rose in the ashes of the hunter’s camp-fires, and we are all a great neighborhood, united in a common understanding of what democracy is, and animated by ideals of what we want it to be. That saving humor which is a philosophy of life flourishes amid the tall corn. We are old enough now—we of the West—to have built up in ourselves a species of wisdom, founded upon experience, which is a part of the continuing, unwritten law of democracy. We are less likely these days to “wobble right” than we are to stand fast or march forward like an army with banners.
We provincials are immensely curious. Art, music, literature, politics—nothing that is of contemporaneous human interest is alien to us. If these things don’t come to us, we go to them. We are more truly representative of the American ideal than our metropolitan cousins, because (here I lay my head upon the block) we know more about, oh, so many things! We know vastly more about the United States, for one thing. We know what New York is thinking before New York herself knows it, because we visit the metropolis to find out. Sleeping-cars have no terrors for us, and a man who has never been west of Philadelphia seems to us a singularly benighted being. Those of our Western school-teachers who don’t see Europe for three hundred dollars every summer get at least as far East as Concord, to be photographed “by the rude bridge that arched the flood.”
That fine austerity which the voluble Westerner finds so smothering on the Boston and New York express is lost utterly at Pittsburg. From gentlemen cruising in day-coaches—dull wights who advertise their personal sanitation and literacy by the toothbrush and fountain-pen planted sturdily in their upper left-hand waistcoat pockets—one may learn the most prodigious facts and the philosophy thereof. “Sit over, brother; there’s hell to pay in the Balkans,” remarks the gentleman who boarded the interurban at Peru or Connersville, and who would just as lief discuss the Papacy or child labor, if revolutions are not to your liking.
In Boston a lady once expressed her surprise that I should be hastening home for Thanksgiving Day. This, she thought, was a New England festival. More recently I was asked by a Bostonian if I had ever heard of Paul Revere. Nothing is more delightful in us, I think, than our meekness before instruction. We strive to please; all we ask is “to be shown.”
Our greatest gain is in leisure and the opportunity to ponder and brood. In all these thousands of country towns live alert and shrewd students of affairs. Where your New Yorker scans headlines as he “commutes” homeward, the villager reaches his own fireside without being shot through a tube, and sits down and reads his newspaper thoroughly. When he repairs to the drug-store to abuse or praise the powers that be, his wife reads the paper, too. A United States Senator from a Middle Western State, making a campaign for renomination preliminary to the primaries, warned the people in rural communities against the newspaper and periodical press with its scandals and heresies. “Wait quietly by your firesides, undisturbed by these false teachings,” he said in effect; “then go to your primaries and vote as you have always voted.” His opponent won by thirty thousand,—the amiable answer of the little red school-house.