It was Joseph Conrad, of course, of whom we were talking, the great Pole who even then had come to a mastery of our language that might shame most of his contemporary writers in it. I would not give “Lord Jim” for all the other sea stories that were ever written, not even if all the novels of Cooper and Scott and Stevenson and Dickens were thrown in. For Joseph Conrad can see all that the old sailor Steffens was imagining that day could see, and far more besides; he can see into the human soul. He had not written “Lord Jim” at that time, or if he had, I had not read it, nor had Steffens written his books about municipal government, to get back to the subject; too often, I fear, have I been thinking about some book of Joseph Conrad when I should have been thinking of municipal government.
I did not know much about municipal government in those days, except what I had learned in Jones’s campaigns and that theoretical knowledge I had obtained in the courts as his attorney, and I had, I fear, the same indifference to the subject most of our citizens have. I should have preferred any time to talk about literature and I should prefer to do so now, since that is really so much more interesting and important. But the fact that we knew nothing about it in those days was not unusual; nobody knew much about it except that Mr. James Bryce had said that it was the most conspicuous failure of the American Commonwealth, and we quoted this observation so often that one might have supposed we were proud of the distinction. Certainly few in America in those days understood the subject in the sense in which it is understood in some of the British cities, like Glasgow, for instance, whose municipal democracy is so far ahead of ours, or in the German cities where municipal administration is veritably a science. But in Steffens’s case a lack of knowledge was in itself a qualification, since he had eyes, like the old sailor, and, like Joseph Conrad, the power to tell what he saw. That is, Steffens had vision, imagination, and if the history of the city in America is ever written he will fill a large place on its page.
I marvel when I reflect that he could see so clearly what most had not even the sensitiveness to feel. He went at his task quite in the scientific spirit, isolating first that elementary germ or microbe, the partizan, the man who always voted the straight ticket in municipal elections, the most virulent organism that ever infested the body politic and as unconscious of its toxic power as the bacillus of yellow fever. Then he discovered the foul culture this organism blindly breeds—the political machine, with its boss. But he went on and his quest led him to the public service corporation, the street railway company, the gas company, the electricity company, and then his trail led him out into the state, and he produced a series of studies of politics in the American cities which has never been equaled, and so had a noble and splendid part in the great awakening of our time.
As long as his writings exposed only the low and the vulgar politicians, ward heelers and bosses, and the like, he was quite popular; I believe he was even asked to deliver addresses before clubs of the dilettante, and even in churches, for the righteous were terrible in their wrath. But when he went more deeply, when he exposed the respectable connections of the machine politicians, some of his admirers fell away, and stood afar off, like certain disciples of old. The citizen was delighted when some city other than his own was under the scrutiny of the sharp eyes that gleamed behind those round glasses, but when he drew near for a local study, there was an uplifting of the hands in pious horror. Cincinnati applauded the exposure of Minneapolis, and St. Louis was pleased to have Philadelphia reformed. Reform is popular so long as someone else is to be reformed.
XXIX
Steffens came to Toledo occasionally, and I recall an evening when we sat in my library and he told me of a certain editor with whom he had been talking; the editor had been praising his work with a fervor that filled Steffens with despair.
“Must I write up every city in the United States before they will see?” he said. “If I were to do Toledo, how that chap would berate me!”
He came to Toledo early in his investigations, and I took him to see Jones, and as we left the City Hall in the late afternoon of that spring day, Steffens was somehow depressed; we had walked a block in St. Clair Street in silence when he said:
“Why, that man’s program will take a thousand years!”
It did seem long to wait. There was a time when I thought it might be done in a shorter period, but I have found myself under the necessity of extending the term from time to time. I fear now that Steffens’s estimate of the length of Jones’s program was rather short, but I know of no other way that the program can be carried out. Steffens himself is not so impatient now; he learned much more about our cities than he ever wrote or dared to write, much no doubt that he could not write. Great as was the data he collected, before all the conclusions could be drawn, all the general rules deduced, it would be necessary to have the data of all life, of which the cities are microcosms. The subject, after all, is rather large.