America will remain in the highway to freedom because printing presses are whirling, because railway trains are moving, because news is streaming along the telegraph wires, because schools and colleges and libraries are open—because intelligence is diffused and is ever more widely diffusing. Rights may be and constantly are assailed in isolated instances. But each instance remains and must remain isolated. None has become or can become a precedent. And there must be precedent or there can be no tyranny. Prejudice, even wilful prejudice, still thrives; truth and error have not yet been divorced from their unholy alliance which seduces honest men to the purposes of rascals; passion still rules the heart and the heart still rules the reason. But America must be free, however hard it may struggle against freedom; Intelligence is striking off the shackles. It can no more be stopped or stayed than the law of gravitation can be suspended.
The European, or the American returning from a visit to Europe, is always disagreeably impressed by the evidences of haste, of imperfection in detail, by “the ragged ends sticking out.” But after a moment’s consideration of the reasons for this slovenliness wise criticism is disarmed. In the busiest hundred years the world has ever seen the Americans have had to shape out of a trackless wilderness a complete civilization containing as many as possible of the good ideas of the world’s past and having also all the latest improvements. There has been no time to “gather up loose ends.” The filling in of gaps, the replacing of makeshifts with permanent structures, the finishing and the polishing, have been perforce left to posterity. And, thanks to the passing and the present generations, posterity will have the leisure and the resources, and also the finer qualifications, necessary to that part of the task of civilization-building.
The shortcomings of to-day, as nationally characteristic as our energy and our mental alertness, are most obvious, of course, in the public administration—disagreeable in the national administration, painful in the state administration, shocking in the municipal administration. Because of these spectacles of sloth, incompetence and corruption in public officials, it is charged by many persons of reputation as “publicists” that Democracy is a breeder of public corruption. The truth is just the reverse. Democracy drags public corruption out of its mole-tunnels where it undermines society, drags it into the full light of day, draws its deadly fangs that fasten in fundamental human rights, cuts its fatal claws that sink deep into the throat of freedom. One sees and hears more of public corruption in a Democracy than in a State. An organism that is expelling disease at its surface looks worse than one which is hiding and fostering disease in its vitals.
Corruption is no offspring of Democracy. It is co-existent with human passions and weaknesses. Society is but a conglomerate of individuals; the whole, with all the strength of all the parts, has also all their weakness. In a State the public administration is the parlor; in a Democracy it is the servants’ hall. Public corruption in a State means that the head of the house is corrupt; public corruption in a Democracy means that the servants need attention.
Our serious public corruption—national, State and municipal—is of a kind unknown to the people of two generations ago. About the middle of the last century science developed to the point at which it was able to give man weapons adequate to the thorough conquest of nature and of natural difficulties. The American people at once seized these most timely tools and began the rapid conquest of their vast, undeveloped heritage. Forty years ago this was a sturdy but dull and monotonous agricultural nation. It was hindered in intercourse with the rest of civilization by the wide ocean, across which passage was slow, painful, dangerous. It had a sparse, scattered population leading a severe and sodden rural or semi-rural life. There were no cities in the modern sense, practically no railroads, few and wretched wagon roads, few factories, no great distributing agencies, no telegraphs. Each section was shut off from, was ignorant and suspicious of, the others. Opportunities for advancement, for individual elevation, did not, as now, press upon even the incompetent and unworthy through very profusion, but were rare, uncertain and narrow.
From the recent great industrial-social revolution has emerged the America of to-day—a land undreamed by our forefathers, uncomprehended by ourselves. In every essential of life—in education, in comfort, in refinement—there has been an immeasurable advance. And, most important of all, intelligence and that divine, truly democratic spirit of discontent, which has ever been the harbinger of enlightened progress, have penetrated to the remotest farmhouses, and fight a valiant and a winning battle with the sloth and despair of our city slums. Incidental to this evolution, inseparable from it, logically and naturally a part of it, there have been myriad opportunities for a temptation to corruption. And our corruption has complied with corruption’s universal law. It has been in direct proportion to opportunity.
As long as only old and familiar forms had to be combated the people did not feel, as they do now, the inadequacy, the utter unfitness of their electoral machinery for the work of selecting and controlling their public administrators. This machinery, with some slight changes, is the same that was used in Athens and that was borrowed by the Greeks from the Egyptians. It is the crudest and clumsiest device possible for registering the public will. It works fairly well in small communities where the people are not busy, where everybody knows everybody else, where public administrators can be held to strict personal account by their neighbors, their masters.
Until the two last centuries the world had little use for electoral machinery. And until the last fifty years, at most, there were no conditions that forcibly demanded the invention of a new electoral machine—one that would permit a people to register their will quickly, without circumlocutions, and at the same time without the haste that makes right action an accident.
In addition to this fundamental disadvantage our people are also contending against an almost equally unfortunate limitation. The industrial revolution presses into private service not merely all of the best minds of the nation, but also most of the minds in which large measures of both capacity and character are combined. Even the mediocres who would best fill public office—which in a Democracy should be obedient and never initiatory—have been impressed by high pecuniary rewards into private service. But demand creates supply. Give us a little time and our supply will once more equal the demands upon it. We are manufacturing competent, intelligent men and women workers by the tens and the hundreds of thousands now-a-days—faster than private enterprise can absorb them, in such vast numbers that not the richest plutocracy could seduce and silence all or even a large proportion of them. Give us a little time, another thirty years or so—at most.
Meanwhile let us not forget:—