The unspoken religion of all sensible men inculcates thrift as the first virtue. Business thunders at the young man, “Thou shalt have none other gods but me.” Nor is it a weak threat, for business, when it speaks, means business. The young doctor in the small town who advocates reform loses practice for two reasons: first, because it is imagined that he is not a serious man, not a good doctor, if he gives time to things outside his profession; second, because the carriage-maker does not agree with him and regards it as a moral duty to punish him. The newsdealer in the Arcade at Rector Street lost custom because it was discovered that he was a Bryan man. The bankers would not buy papers of him. Since the days of David, the great luxury of the powerful has been to be free from the annoyance of other persons’ opinions. The professional classes in any community are parasites on the moneyed classes; they attend the distribution. They cannot strike the hand that feeds them. In a country where economic laws tend to throw the money into the hands of a certain type of men, the morality of those men is bound to affect society very seriously.
The world-famous “timidity” of Americans in matters of opinion, is the outward and visible sign of a mental preoccupation. Tocqueville thought it was due to their democratic form of government. It is not due to democracy, but to commercial conditions. In Tocqueville’s day it arose out of the slavery question, solely because that question affected trade.
In describing the social life of Boston, Josiah Quincy says of George Ticknor’s hospitality: “There seemed to be a cosmopolitan spaciousness about his very vestibule. He received company with great ease, and a simple supper was always served to his evening visitors. Prescott, Everett, Webster, Hillard, and other noted Bostonians well mixed with the pick of such strangers as happened to be in the city, furnished a social entertainment of the first quality. Politics, at least American politics, were never mentioned.”
It was at such “entertainments” as this that the foreign publicists received their impressions as to the extinction of free speech in America. Politics could not be mentioned; but this was not due to our democratic form of government, but to the fact that Beacon Street was trading with South Carolina. “Politics” meant slavery, and Beacon Street could not afford to have values disturbed—not even at a dinner party.
We have seen that our more recent misgovernment has not been due to democracy, and we now see that the most striking weakness of our social life is not and never has been due to democracy.
Let us take an example: A party of men meet in a club, and the subject of free trade is launched. Each of these men has been occupied all day in an avocation where silence is golden. Shall he be the one to speak first? Who knows but what some phase of the discussion may touch his pocket? But the matter is deeper. Free speech is a habit. It cannot be expected from such men, because a particular subject is free from danger. Let the subject be dress reform, and the traders will be equally politic.
This pressure of self-interest which prevents a man from speaking his mind comes on top of that familiar moral terrorism of any majority, even a majority of two persons against one, which is one of the ultimate phenomena of human intercourse.
It is difficult to speak out a sentiment that your table companions disapprove of. Even Don Quixote was afraid to confess that it was he who had set the convicts at liberty, because he heard the barber and curate denounce the thing as an outrage. Now the weight of this normal social pressure in any particular case will depend on how closely the individuals composing the majority resemble each other. But men, lighted by the same passion, pursuing one object under the similar conditions, of necessity grow alike. By a process of natural selection, the self-seekers of Europe have for sixty years been poured into the hopper of our great mill. The Suabian and the Pole each drops his costume, his language, and his traditions as he goes in. They come out American business men; and in the second generation they resemble each other more closely in ideals, in aims, and in modes of thought than two brothers who had been bred to different trades in Europe.
The uniformity of occupation, the uniformity of law, the absence of institutions, like the church, the army, family pride, in fact, the uniformity of the present and the sudden evaporation of all the past, have ground the men to a standard.
America turns out only one kind of man. Listen to the conversation of any two men in a street car. They are talking about the price of something—building material, advertising, bonds, cigars.