Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

But after the whole economic system has been re-adjusted and perfected and equalized, after we have the minimum wage, and the single tax, and industrial democracy, and every man gets what he produces, and economic pressure has been as scientifically adjusted as the atmospheres in a submarine torpedo boat, there is always the great law of the contrariety of things to be reckoned with, according to which the more carefully planned the event, the less it resembles the original conception. The human vision is so weak, and the great circle of life so prodigious! The solution will come, if it ever comes at all, by slow, patient, laborious, drudging study, far from the midnight session of the legislature, far from the ear and the pencil of the eager reporter, far from the platform of the sweating revivalist, far from the head office of the police. Our fondly perused pornography might expose the whole of the underworld to the light of day, the general assembly might enact successive revisions of the revised statutes for a hundred years, we might develop the most superb police organization in all history, achieving the apotheosis of the Puritan ideal with a dictagraph in every bedroom and closet in the town, and it all would be of no avail. The study must survey the whole field of social and domestic relations, until the vast mystery of life is understood, and the relation between its wide antitheses established as Tolstoy presents them in his story of the poor mother who took her daughter to the public house in the village, and the rich mother who, at the same time, took her daughter to the court at St. Petersburg. It will be found perhaps in the long run, for which so few are ever willing to remain, that the eradicable causes of prostitution are due to involuntary poverty, and the awful task is to get involuntary poverty out of the world. It is a task which has all the tremendous difficulties of constructive social labor and it is as deliberate as evolution itself. And even if it is ever accomplished, there will remain a residuum in the problem inhering in the mysteries of sex, concerning which even the wisest and most devoted of our scientists will confess they know very little as yet and have not much to tell us that will do us any good.

LI

In taking the present occasion to say so much about the work in morals which a mayor is expected to perform, I have a disquieting sense that I have fallen into a tone too querulous for the subject, and perhaps taken a mean advantage of the reader in telling of my troubles. It is rather a troubled life that a mayor leads in one of these turbulent American cities, since so much of his time is taken up by reformers who seem to expect him somehow to do their holy work for them, and yet that is doubtless the business of reformers in this world, and since it is their mission to trouble someone, perhaps it is the business of a mayor to be troubled by them in his vicarious and representative capacity. I should not deny reformers their rights in this respect, or their uses in this world, and I should be the last to question their virtues. John Brown was beyond doubt a strong character and an estimable man, who did a great and heroic work in the world, even if he did do it in opposition to the law, and by the law was killed at last for doing it, but by all accounts he must have been a terrible person to live with, and I have often been glad that I was not mayor of Ossawattomie when he was living and reforming there. I would as soon have had Peter the Hermit for a constituent.

I shall not go quite so far as to admit that our reformers were as strong in character as either of these great models I have mentioned, but they were as persistent, or in combination they were as persistent; when one tired or desisted, another promptly took his place; there were so many that they could spell each other, and work in relays, and thus keep the torch ever alive and brandishing. It was not only the social evil with which they were concerned, but the evil of drink, and the evil of gambling, and the evil of theaters, and the evil of moving pictures, and post cards, and of the nude in art, and of lingerie in show windows, and of boys swimming in the river, and playing in the streets, and scores of other conditions which seemed to inspire in them the fear or the thought of evil.

With the advent of spring, the mayor must put a stop to lovers wandering in the parks; when summer comes he must put an end instantly to baseball; in the winter he must close the theaters and the dance halls; in short, as I said before, whenever it was reported from any quarter that there were people having fun, the police must instantly be despatched to put a stop to it.

And strangely enough, even when we did succeed in doing away with some of the evils of the town, when we closed the saloons promptly at midnight, the hour fixed by ordinance, when we did away with many evil resorts, when wine rooms were extirpated, and the number of maisons de tolerance were reduced by eighty-five per cent., when gambling was stamped out, their complaints did not subside, but went on, unabated, the same as before. They could not be satisfied because the whole of their impossible program was not adopted, and more because there was no public recognition of their infallibility and no admission of their righteousness. What that type of mind desires is not, after all, any reasonable treatment of those conditions, or any honest and sincere endeavor to deal with them. It demands intellectual surrender, the acknowledgment of its infallibility, and a protesting hypocrite can more easily meet its views than anyone else.

No wonder then that even such a strong man as Tom Johnson, one evening, when the day was done, should fling himself back in the motor car, with the dark shadow of utter weariness and despair on his face, and say:

“I wish I could take a train to the end of the longest railway in the world, then go as far as wagons could draw me and then walk and crawl as far as I could, and then in the midst of the farthest forest lie down and rest.”

We all have such moments, of course, but we should have fewer of them if we had a national trait of which I have read, in a book by Mr. Fielding Hall in relation to Burma. He says the Burmese have a vast unwillingness to interfere in other people’s affairs.

“A foreigner may go and live in a Burman village,” he says, “may settle down there and live his own life and follow his own customs in perfect freedom; may dress and eat and drink and pray and die as he likes. No one will interfere. No one will try to correct him; no one will be forever insisting to him that he is an outcast, either from civilization or from religion. The people will accept him for what he is and leave the matter there. If he likes to change his ways and conform to Burmese habits and Buddhist forms, so much the better; but if not, never mind.”