Well might the wise and sophisticated laugh at their mayor and call him dreamer! It was, and, alas, it is a dream. But youth is so sublimely confident, and counts so little on opposition. Not the opposition of those who array themselves against it—that was to be expected, of course, that was part of the glorious conflict—but the opposition from within the ranks, the opposition on the hither side of the barricade. For youth thinks, sometimes, that even opponents may be won, if only they can be brought to that vantage ground whence one inevitably beholds the fair and radiant vision. It had not expected the falling away of followers, of supporters, even of friends—the strangely averted eye on the street, the suddenly abandoned weekly call, the cessation of little notes of encouragement, the amazing revelations of malignity and bitterness at election times, and the flood increasing in volume at each succeeding election. One man, thought to be devoted to a cause, fails in his desire to secure an office; another you refuse a contract; he whom you neglected to favor in January punctually appears in the opposition ranks in November, one by one they drop away, and multiply into an army. Even in the official group in the City Hall and in the council, there are jealousies, and childish spites, and pitiable little ambitions and with them misunderstanding, gossip, slander, anonymous attacks, lies, abuse, hatred, until youth makes the awful discovery that there is, after all, in human nature, pure malice, and youth must fight hard to retain its ideals, so continually are all the old lovely illusions stripped away in this bewildering complication of little tragedies and comedies we call life.
To be sure, youth might have known, having read the like in books from infancy, and having made some reflections of its own on the irony of things, and indulged from time to time in philosophizings. But that was about the experience of others, from which none of us is wise enough to learn. Most of us indeed are not wise enough to learn from our own. It is all a part of life. What a thing human life is, to be sure, and human nature! Ay di mi! as Carlyle used to say. Patience, and shuffle the cards!...
... I had no intention of recalling such things. Did not Jones say that when the Golden Rule would not work, it was not the fault of the Rule, but because one did not quite know how to work it? I have no intention of setting down the failures or the little successes of four terms as mayor. Nor shall I write a little history of those terms in office; I could not, and it would not be worth while if I could. I shall not attempt in these pages a treatise on municipal government, for if the task were rightly executed, it would be a history of civilization. Non-partizanship in municipal elections, municipal ownership, home rule for cities,—who is interested in these? I have discussed them in interviews—(“Is there to be a statement for us this morning, Mr. Mayor?”)—and speeches numerous as autumn leaves, and like them, lost now in the winds to which they were given.
After all, it is life in which we are all interested. And one sees a deal of life in a mayor’s office, and in it one may learn to envisage it as—just life. Then one can have a philosophy about it, though one cannot discover a panacea, some sort of sociological patent medicine to be administered to the community, like Socialism, or Prohibition, or absolute law enforcement, or the commission form of government. One indeed may open one’s eyes and look at one’s city and presently behold its vast antitheses, its boulevards and marble palaces at one end, and its slums, its tenements and tenderloins at the other. He may discern there the operations of universal and inexorable laws, and realize the tremendous conflict that everywhere and in all times goes on between privilege and the people. Such a view may simplify life for him; it may make easy the peroration to the campaign speech; it may provide a glib and facile answer to any question. But he should have a care lest it make him the slave of its own clichés, as Socialists for instance, when they become purely scientific, explain every human impulse, emotion and deed by simply repeating the formula “Economic determinism.”
But it will not do; it will not suffice. This view of life is simple only because it is narrow and confined; in far perspectives there appear curious and perplexing contradictions. And even then, the most exhaustive analysis of life and of human society, however immense and comprehensive, however logical and inevitable its generalizations, must always fall short simply because no human mind and no assembly of human minds can ever wholly envisage the vast and bewildering complexity of human life. Each man views life from that angle where he happens to have been placed by forces he cannot comprehend. All of which no doubt is a mere repetition in feebler terms of what has heretofore been spoken of the inherent vice of the sectarian mind. There are no rigid distinctions of good and bad, of proletarians and capitalists, of privileged and proscribed; there are just people, just folks, as Jones said, with their human weaknesses, follies, and mistakes, their petty ambitions, their miserable jealousies and envies, their triumphs, and glories and boundless dreams, and all tending somewhither, they know not where nor how, and all pretty much alike. And government, be its form what it may, is but the reflection of all these qualities. The city, said Coriolanus, is the people, and as Jones used to say, with those strange embracing gestures, “I believe in all the people.”
XXXVIII
However, all these confused elements make the task of a mayor exceedingly difficult, especially in America where there are, not so many kinds of people, but so many different standards and customs and habits. When one gets down into humanity, one beholds not two classes, separate and distinct as the sexes, but innumerable classes. In Toledo something more than twenty languages and dialects are spoken every day, and as the mayor is addressed the chorus becomes a very babel, a confusion of tongues, all counseling him to his duty. The result is apt to be perplexing at times. The rights of “business” in the streets and to the public property, the proper bounds within which strikers and strike breakers are to be confined, the limitations of the activities of pickets, the hours in which it is proper to drink beer, who in the community should gamble, whether Irishmen or Germans make the better policemen; the exact proportion of public jobs which Poles and Hungarians should hold; whether Socialists on their soap boxes are obstructing traffic or merely exercising the constitutional right of free speech, whether there are more Catholics than Protestants holding office; whether the East Side is receiving its due consideration in comparison with the West Side; whether boys have the right to play ball in the streets, and lovers to spoon in parks, and whose conceptions of morals is to prevail—these, like the sins of the Psalmist, are ever before him.
And with it all there is a strange, inexplicable belief in the almost supernatural power of a mayor. I have been waited on by committees—of aged men—demanding that I stop at once those lovers who sought the public park on moonlit nights in June, I have been roused from bed at two o’clock in the morning, with a demand that a team of horses in a barn four miles on the other side of town be fed; innumerable ladies have appealed to me to compel their husbands to show them more affectionate attention, others have asked me to prohibit their neighbors from talking about them. One Jewish resident was so devout that he emigrated to Jerusalem, and his family insisted that I recall him; a Christian missionary asked me to detail policemen to assist him in converting the Jews to his creed; and pathetic mothers were ever imploring me to order the release of their sons and husbands from prisons and penitentiaries, over which I had no possible jurisdiction. I have recalled I know not how many times a remark Jones made one evening after one of those weary days I afterward came to know so well; “I could wash my hands every day in women’s tears.”
Of course, the main thing was not to wash one’s hands of them or their difficulties. I remember one poor soul whose husband was in the penitentiary. She came to me in a despair that was almost frantic, and showed me a letter she had received from her husband. A new governor had been elected in that state wherein he was imprisoned, and he urged his wife, in the letter she gave me to read, to secure a pardon for him before the new governor was inaugurated. “They say,” he wrote, “that the new governor is a good church member, which is a bad sign for being good to prisoners.”
Poor soul! It was impossible to explain to her that I was wholly powerless. She stood and humbly shook her sorrowful head, and to each new attempt at explanation she said: