It was something like that, those intimacies, vouchsafed for a moment in our early meetings, whether those at noon or those at night, in the suffocating little halls, or the cold tent, with the torches tossing their flames in your eyes as you spoke, and it was even that way in those curious meetings down in the darker quarter of the town, where the waste of the city lifted up faces that were seared and scarred with the appalling catastrophes of the soul that had somehow befallen them, and there was unutterable longing there.
The one thing that marred these contacts was not only that one was so powerless to help these men, but that one stood before them in an attitude that somehow suggested to them, inevitably, from long habit and the pretense of men who sought power for themselves, that one needed only to be placed in a certain official relation to them, and to be addressed by a certain title, to be able to help them. It was enough to make one ashamed, almost enough to cause one to prefer that they should vote for someone else, and relieve one from this dreadful self-consciousness, this dreadful responsibility.
And these were the people! These were they who had been so long proscribed and exploited; they had borne a few of the favored of the fates on their backs, and yet, bewildered, they were somehow expectant of that good to come to them which had been promised in the words and phrases by which their very acquiescence and subjugation had so mysteriously been wrought—“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Where? And for them, when? Not through the efforts of those who employed cold phrases about “good” government, and “reform,” and “business” administrations, and efficiency methods, and enforcement of the laws, and law and order, and all that sort of thing, and class consciousness, and economic, or any other interpretation of history, or through initiatives, referendums and recalls. What good would any of these cold and precise formulæ do them? Better perhaps the turkey at Thanksgiving, and the goose at Christmas time which the old machine councilman from the ward gave them; of course they themselves paid for them, but they did not know it, and the councilman did not know it; he had bestowed them with the voice of kindness, in the same hearty human spirit in which he came to the wedding or the wake, or got the father a job, or the oldest son a parole from the workhouse, and rendered a thousand other little personal services. Perhaps Bath House John and Hinky Dink were more nearly right after all than the cold and formal and precise gentleman who denounced their records in the council. For they were human, and the great problem is to make the government of a city human.
There were many, of course, even in our own movement, who were not concerned about that; I was strongly rebuked by one of them once in that very first campaign for declaring that we were no better than anyone else, and that all the “good” men of the world could not do the people much good even if they were elected to the city government for life. No, we may have efficient governments in our cities, and honest governments, as we are beginning to have everywhere, and, happily, are more and more to have, but the great emancipations will not come through the formulæ of Independents, Socialists, or single-taxers, nor through Law and Order Leagues, nor Civic Associations. Down in their hearts these are not what the people want. What they want is a life that is fuller, more beautiful, more splendid and, above all, more human. And nobody can prepare it and hand it over to them. They must get it themselves; it must come up through them and out of them, through long and toilsome processes of development; for such is democracy.
“That man’s program will take a thousand years!” Lincoln Steffens had said in despair that day I introduced him to Jones. Yes—or a hundred thousand. But there is no other way.
XXXV
The most efficient executive of which there is any record in history is clearly that little centurion who could say: “For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers; and I say unto one, go, and he goeth; and to another, come, and he cometh; and to my servant, do this, and he doeth it.”
In my experience as an executive I learned that it was easy to say “Go,” but that the fellows did not go promptly; I could say “Come,” and he came—after a while, perhaps, when I had said “Come” again, and that sometimes, having said “Do this,” I had to go myself and do it, or leave it undone.
Executive ability is a mysterious quality inhering in personality, and partaking of its mysteries.