Perhaps I would not, if I were an angel.
I do not want to be an angel.
I am more ambitious. I want my ideals to do things, and I want to stand by people who are doing things with their ideals, whether their ideals are my ideals or not.
Let us suppose. Suppose the reader were in Mr. Cadbury's place. What would he do? Here are two things, let us suppose, he wishes very much. He wishes a certain class of people would not bet, and he also wishes to convince these same people of certain important social and political ideas for which he stands. If he told them that he would have nothing to do with them unless they stopped betting, there would be no object in his publishing their paper at all. There would be nothing that they would let him tell them. If, on the other hand, he begins merely as one more humble, fellow-human being, and puts himself definitely on record as not betting himself, and still more definitely as wishing other people would not bet, and then admits honestly that these other people have as good a right to decide to bet as he has to decide not to; and if he then deliberately proceeds to do what every real gentleman who does not smoke and wishes other people did not, does without question—namely, offers them the facilities for doing it why should people call him inconsistent?
Perhaps a man's consistency consists in his relation to his own smoking and betting and not in his rushing his consistency over into the smoking and betting of other people. Perhaps being consistent does not need to mean being a little pharisaical, or using force, or cutting people off and having no argument with them, in one matter, because one cannot agree with them in another. Of course, I admit it would be better if Mr. Cadbury would publish in a parallel column (if he could get a genius to write it) an extremely tolerant, human, comrade-like series of objections to betting, which people could read alongside, and which would persuade people as much as possible not to read the best betting tips in the world in the column next door, but certainly the act of furnishing the tips in the meantime and of being sure that they are the best tips in the world, is a very real, human, courageous act. It even has a kind of rough and ready religion in it. It may be too much to expect, but even in our goodness perhaps we ought to do as we would be done by. We must be righteous, but on the whole, must we not be righteous toward others as we would have them righteous toward us?
What many of us find ourselves wishing most of all, when we come upon some specially attractive man is, that we could discover some way, or that he could discover some way, in which the idealist in him, and the realist in him could be got to act together.
There are some of us who have come to believe that in the dead earnest, daily, almost desperate struggle of modern life, the real solid idealist will have to care enough about his ideals to arrange to have two complete sets, one set which he calls his personal ideals, which are of such a nature that he can carry them out alone and rigidly and quite by himself, and another which he calls his bending or coöperative ideals, geared a little lower and adjusted to more gradual usage, which he uses when he asks other men to act with him.
It may take a very single-hearted and strong man to keep before his own mind and before other people's his two sets of ideals, his "I" faiths, and his you-and-I faiths, keeping each in strict proportion, but it would certainly be a great human adventure to do it. Saying "God and I," and saying "God and you and I" are two different arts. And it is clear-headedness and not inconsistency in a man that keeps him so.
This is not a mere defence of Mr. Cadbury; it is a defence of a type of man, of a temperament in our modern life, of men like Edward A. Filene, of Boston, of a man like Hugh Mac Rae, one of the institutions of North Carolina, of Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland, of nine men out of ten of the bigger and more creative sort who are helping cities to get their way and nations to express themselves. I have believed that the principle at stake, the great principle for real life in England and in America, of letting a man be inconsistent if he knows how—must have a stand made for it.