“President of—this and that, eh?”
“Yes.”
“And your daughters just home from a finishing school in Europe, aren’t they?”
“Yes—but what——?”
“I was wondering,” said the Irish lad, rising, “how you dared go home at night and look ’em in the face.”
Not all men though have the character, the moral resistance of that Irish lad, and the scores of the weak and erring ones are the tragic figures in the long drama of the traction company in the city, in any city—the drama that cannot be written.
LVIII
Meanwhile, the education of the general mind went on, and we were, after all, tending somewhither. Our experience in the greatest of our tasks demonstrated that, and in the change that gradually took place in sentiment concerning the street railway problem, there was an evidence of the development of a mass consciousness, a mass will, which some time in these cities of ours will justify democracy. It is of course the most difficult process in the world, for a mass of two hundred thousand people to unite in the expression of a will concerning a single abstract proposition. The mass to be sure can now and then as it were rear its head and blaze forth wrath and accomplish some instant work of destruction; even if it be nothing more than the destruction of an individual reputation. That is why the recall is so popular and so generously and frequently employed in those cities that have it. In such elections, with their personal and human center of interest, the people all turn out, while in a referendum involving some abstract principle, the vote cast is always small. That is why the referendum is so important, and the recall, relatively, so unimportant; the use of the first in the long run will afford a fine schooling for the people.
The most familiar expression of this rage of course was the clamor for the indictment and imprisonment of someone connected in sinister ways with the company, a demand with which I never had the slightest sympathy, to which I could never yield the slightest acquiescence. What good, though all the poor and miserable servitors of privilege were put in prison, while privilege itself remained? Such clamors have had their results; a few more broken lives, a little more sorrow and shame in the world, and the clamor ceases, and things go on the same as before.
It is this instability, this variableness, this weariness of the public mind, on which privilege depends, with a cynical trust so often justified that it might breed cynicism in all observant and reflective natures. The street railway proprietors in Toledo expected each election to demonstrate this weariness in the people, and to restore them to, or at least confirm them in, the privileges they had enjoyed under the old régime.