"Quite right," acknowledged Truesdale. "Why, to-day, when the peasants come into Rome from the Campagna, they always bring their pitchforks with them—you can see them any Sunday behind the Capitol. They're going to be murdered or robbed or imprisoned or something."
"And when these people have been out of the government from generation to generation, and opposed to it and mistrustful of it, is it an easy matter, on their coming over here, to make them feel themselves a part of it, and to imbue them with a loyalty to it?"
"One thing more," broke in the first speaker. "There is another element; it is imported from the nearer half of Europe, and is a more dangerous element still. I mean the element of feudality."
"Oh," said Truesdale, "now I begin to see."
"The essence of feudality is the idea of personal loyalty. Now, loyalty to another individual is a good thing in its way and in its own field and in a certain measure and at a certain juncture.
"But it is not the right prop for a great republic. That requires not the idea of personal loyalty to some chief, but the idea of personal responsibility to a cause above all chiefs. This takes a breadth of view and a loftiness of ideal that only one race in the world has ever possessed—our own. The great man, politically, is the man who can eliminate the personal element from a great cause. The little man is the—well," turning to Truesdale, "there are the general data; make your own application of them."
"I see," said Truesdale; "my people are naturally against the governing powers anyway, from instinct and heredity; even when one of them does attain official position, it is only the position of the worm in the apple. And they think, too, that it is a more sane and practical thing to help one another out of a tangible difficulty than to sacrifice one another to an intangible cause. I never contended they were not human!"
"That isn't all, by any means," said Brower, determinedly. "There's just as bad behind." He resettled himself in his chair, as he claimed the attention of the room. He seemed to Truesdale as if seating himself in a saddle—a saddle on the back of some well-ridden hobby. Truesdale already heard the steed pant and champ.
"This town of ours labors under one peculiar disadvantage: it is the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the one common, avowed object of making money. There you have its genesis, its growth, its end and object; and there are but few of us who are not attending to that object very strictly. In this Garden City of ours every man cultivates his own little bed and his neighbor his; but who looks after the paths between? They have become a kind of No Man's Land, and the weeds of a rank iniquity are fast choking them up. The thing to teach the public is this: that the general good is a different thing from the sum of the individual goods. Over in the Settlement we are trying to make those new-comers realize that they are a part of the body politic; perhaps we need another settlement to remind some of the original charter-members of the same fact!"
"H'm," thought Truesdale, "I believe Brower is an awfully fine fellow; but if he keeps up this kind of talk all the time with Jane…."