So far as human suffering goes, the positive evils of the system fall largely on the poor. The rich buy immunity, but the poor are persecuted, and have no escape. This has always been the case under a tyranny. What else could we expect in New York? The Lexow investigation showed us the condition of the police force. The lower courts, both criminal and civil, and the police department were used for vote-getting and for money-getting purposes. They were serving as instruments of extortion and of favoritism. But in the old police courts the foreigner and the honest poor were actually attacked. Process was issued against them, their business was destroyed, and they were jailed unless they could buy off. This system still exists to some extent in the lower civil courts.
It is obvious that all these things come to pass through the fault of no one in particular. We have to-day reached the point where the public is beginning to understand that the iniquity is accomplished by means of the political boss. Every one is therefore abusing the boss. But Platt and Croker are not worse than the men who continue to employ them after understanding their function. These men stand for the conservative morality of New York, and for standards but little lower than the present standards.
Let us now see how those standards came to exist. Imagine a community in which, for more than a generation, the government has been completely under boss rule, so that the system has become part of the habits and of the thought of the people, and consider what views we might expect to find in the hearts of the citizens of such a community. The masses will have been controlled by what is really bribery and terrorism, but what appears in the form of a very plausible appeal to the individual on the ground of self-interest. For forty years money and place have been corrupting them. Their whole conception of politics is that it is a matter of money and of place. The well-to-do will have been apt to prosper in proportion as they have made themselves serviceable to the dominant powers, and have become part and parcel of the machinery of the system. It is not to be pretended that every man in such a community is a rascal, but it is true that in so far as his business brings him into contact with the administrative officers every man will be put to the choice between lucrative malpractice and thankless honesty. A conviction will spread throughout the community that nothing can be done without a friend at court; that honesty does not pay, and probably never has paid in the history of the world; that a boss is part of the mechanism by which God governs mankind; that property would not be safe without him; and, finally, that the recognized bosses are not so bad as they are painted. The great masses of corporate property have owners who really believe that the system of government which enabled them to make money is the only safe government. These people cling to abuses as to a life-preserver. They fear that an honest police board will not be able to bribe the thieves not to steal from them, that an honest State insurance department will not be able to prevent the legislature from pillaging them. It is absolutely certain that in the first struggles for reform the weight of the mercantile classes will be thrown very largely on the side of conservatism.
Now, in a great city like New York the mercantile bourgeoisie will include almost every one who has an income of five thousand dollars a year, or more. These men can be touched by the bosses, and therefore, after forty years of tyranny, it is not to be expected that many of those who wear black coats will have much enthusiasm for reform. It is “impracticable;” it is “discredited;” it is “expensive;” it is “advocated by unknown men;” it speaks ill of the “respectable;” it “does harm” by exciting the poor against the rich; it is “unbusinesslike” and “visionary;” it is “self-righteous.” We have accordingly had, in New York city, a low and perverted moral tone, an incapacity to think clearly or to tell the truth when we know it. This is both the cause and the consequence of bondage. A generation of men really believe that honesty is bad policy, and continue to be governed by Tammany Hall.
The world has wondered that New York could not get rid of its famous incubus. The gross evils as they existed at the time of Tweed are remembered. The great improvements are not generally known. Reform has been slow, because its leaders have not seen that their work was purely educational. They did not understand the political combination, and they kept striking at Tammany Hall. Like a child with a toy, they did not see that the same mechanism which caused Punch to strike caused Judy’s face to disappear from the window.
It is not selfishness and treason that are mainly responsible for the discredit which dogs “reform.” It is the inefficiency of upright and patriotic men. The practical difficulty with reform movements in New York has been that the leaders of such movements have clung to old political methods. These men have thought that if they could hire or imitate the regular party machinery, they could make it work for good. They would fight banditti with bravi. They would expel Tammany Hall, and lo, Tammany is within them.
Is it a failure of intellect or of morality which prevents the reformers from seeing that idealism is the shortest road to their goal? It is the failure of both. It is a legacy of the old tyranny. In one sense it is corruption; in another it is stupidity; in every sense it is incompetence. Political incompetence is only another name for moral degradation, and both exist in New York for the same reason that they exist in Turkey. They are the offspring of blackmail.
Well-meaning and public-spirited men, who have been engrossed in business for the best part of their lives, are perhaps excusable for not understanding the principles on which reform moves. Any one can see that if what was wanted was merely a good school board, the easiest way to get it would be to go to Croker, give him a hundred thousand dollars, and offer to let him alone if he gave the good board. But until very recently nobody could see that putting good school commissioners on Platt’s ticket and giving Platt the hundred thousand dollars was precisely the same thing.
In an enterprise whose sole aim is to raise the moral standard, idealism always pays. A reverse following a fight for principle, like the defeat of Low, is pure gain. It records the exact state of the cause. It educates the masses on a gigantic scale. The results of that education are immediately visible.