Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

The true starting-point for the world’s progress will never be reached by any nation as a whole. It exists and has been reached in the past as it will in the future by individuals scattered here and there in every nation. It is reached by those minds which insist on seeing conditions as they are, and which cannot confine their thoughts to their own kitchen, or to their own creed, or to their own nation. You will think I have in mind poets and philosophers, for these men take humanity as their subject, and deal in the general stuff of human nature. But the narrow spirit in which they often do this cuts down their influence to parish limits. I mean rather those men who in private life act out their thoughts and feelings as to the unity of human life; those same thoughts which the poets and philosophers have expressed in their plays, their sayings, and their visions. There have always been men who in their daily life have fulfilled those intimations and instincts which, if reduced to a statement, receive the names of poetry and religion. These men are the cart-horses of progress, they devote their lives to doing things which can only be justified or explained by the highest philosophy. They proceed as if all men were their brothers. These practical philanthropists go plodding on through each century and leave the bones of their character mingled with the soil of their civilization.

See how large the labors of such men look when seen in historic perspective. They have changed the world’s public opinion. They have moulded the world’s institutions into forms expressive of their will. I ask your attention to one of their achievements. We have one province of conduct in which the visions of the poets have been reduced to practice—yes, erected into a department of government—through the labors of the philanthropists. They have established the hospital and the reformatory; and these visible bastions of philosophy hold now a more unchallenged place in our civilization than the Sermon on the Mount on which they comment.

The truth which the philanthropists of all ages have felt is that the human family was a unit; and this truth, being as deep as human nature, can be expressed in every philosophy—even in the inverted utilitarianism now in vogue. The problem of how to treat insane people and criminals has been solved to this extent, that everyone agrees that nothing must be done to them which injures the survivors. That is the reason we do not kill them. It is unpleasant to have them about, and this unpleasantness can be cured only by our devotion to them. We must either help the wretched or we ourselves become degenerate. They have thus become a positive means of civilizing the modern world; for the instinct of self-preservation has led men to deal with this problem in the only practical way.

Put a Chinaman into your hospital and he will be cared for. You may lie awake at night drawing up reasons for doing something different with this disgusting Chinaman—who, somehow, is in the world and is thrown into your care, your hospital, your thought—but the machinery of your own being is so constructed that if you take any other course with him than that which you take with your own people, your institution will instantly lose its meaning; you would not have the face to beg money for its continuance in the following year. The logic of this, which, if you like, is the logic of self-protection under the illusion of self-sacrifice, is the logic which is at the bottom of all human progress. I dislike to express this idea in its meanest form; but I know there are some professors of political economy here, and I wish to be understood. The utility of hospitals is not to cure the sick. It is to teach mercy. The veneration for hospitals is not accorded to them because they cure the sick, but because they stand for love, and responsibility.

The appeal of physical suffering makes the strongest attack on our common humanity. Even zealots and sectaries are touched. The practice and custom of this kind of mercy have therefore become established, while other kinds of mercy which require more imagination are still in their infancy. But at the bottom of every fight for principle you will find the same sentiment of mercy. If you take a slate and pencil and follow out the precise reasons and consequences of the thing, you will always find that a practical and effective love for mankind is working out a practical self-sacrifice. The average man cannot do the sum, he does not follow the reasoning, but he knows the answer. The deed strikes into his soul with a mathematical impact, and he responds like a tuning-fork when its note is struck.

Everyone knows that self-sacrifice is a virtue. The child takes his nourishment from the tale of heroism as naturally as he takes milk. He feels that the deed was done for his sake. He adopts it: it is his own. The nations have always stolen their myths from one another, and claimed each other’s heroes. It has required all the world’s heroes to make the world’s ear sensitive to new statements, illustrations and applications of the logic of progress. Yet their work has been so well done that all of us respond to the old truths in however new a form. Not France alone but all modern society owes a debt of gratitude to Zola for his rescue of Dreyfus. The whole world would have been degraded and set back, the whole world made less decent and habitable, but for those few Frenchmen who took their stand against corruption.

Now the future of civil society upon the earth depends upon the application to international politics of this familiar idea, which we see prefigured in our mythology, and monumentalized in our hospitals—the principle that what is done for one is done for all. When you say a thing is “right,” you appeal to mankind. What you mean is that everyone is at stake. Your attack upon wrong amounts to saying that some one has been left out in the calculation. Both at home and abroad you are always pleading for mercy, and the plea gains such a wide response that some tyranny begins to totter, and its engines are turned upon you to get you to stop. This outcry against you is the measure of your effectiveness. If you imitate Zola and attack some nuisance in this town to-morrow, you will bring on every symptom and have every experience of the Dreyfus affair. The cost is the same, for cold looks are worse than imprisonment. The emancipation of the reformer is the same, for if a man can resist the influences of his townsfolk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition. The public influence is the same, for every citizen of that town can thereafter look a town officer in the face with more self-respect. But not to townsmen, nor to neighboring towns, nor to Parisians is this force confined. It goes out in all directions, continuously. The man is in communication with the world. This impulse of communication with all men is at the bottom of every ambition. The injustice, cruelty, oppression in the world are all different forms of the same non-conductor, that prevents utterances, that stops messages, that strikes dumb the speaker and deafens the listener. You will find that it makes no difference whether the non-conductor be a selfish oligarchy, a military autocracy, or a commercial ring. The voice of humanity is stifled by corruption: and corruption is only an evil because it stifles men.

Try to raise a voice that shall be heard from here to Albany and watch what it is that comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father’s offering you a place in his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you young gentlemen have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations and a close enemy of most men who wish you well.

And what will you get in return? Well, if I must for the benefit of the economist, charge you with some selfish gain, I will say that you get the satisfaction of having been heard, and that this is the whole possible scope of human ambition.