The whole problem of better government is a question of how to get people to stop simpering and saying “After you” to cant. A is an aristocrat. B is a boss. C is a candidate. D is a distiller. E is an excellent citizen. They dine. Gloomy silence would be more respectable than this chipper concern that all shall go well. Is not this politics? Yes, and the very essence of it. Is not the exposure of it practical reform? How easily the arrow goes in! A does not think you should confound him with B, nor E with C. Each is a reformer when he looks to the right, and a scamp as seen from the left. What is their fault? Collusion. “But A means so well.” They all mean well. Let us not confound the gradations of their virtue; but can we call any one an honest man who knowingly consorts with thieves? This they all do. Let us declare it. Their resentment at finding themselves classed together drives the wedge into the clique.
Remember, too, that there is no such thing as abstract truth. You must talk facts, you must name names, you must impute motives. You must say what is in your mind. It is the only means you have of cutting yourself free from the body of this death. Innuendo will not do. Nobody minds innuendo. We live and breathe nothing else. If you are not strong enough to face the issue in private life, do not dream that you can do anything for public affairs. This, of course, means fight, not to-morrow, but now. It is only in the course of conflict that any one can come to understand the system, the habit of thought, the mental condition, out of which all our evils arise. The first difficulty is to see the evils clearly; and when we do see them it is like fighting an atmosphere to contend against them. They are so universal and omnipresent that you have no terms to name them by. You must burn a disinfectant.
We have observed, thus far, that no question is ever involved in practical agitation except truth-telling. So long as a man is trying to tell the truth, his remarks will contain a margin which other people will regard as mystifying and irritating exaggeration. It is this very margin of controversy that does the work. The more accurate he is, the less he exaggerates, the more he will excite people. It is only by the true part of what is said that the interest is roused. No explosion follows a lie.
The awaking of the better feelings of the individual man is not only the immediate but the ultimate end of all politics. Nor need we be alarmed at any collateral results. No one has ever succeeded in drawing any valid distinction between positive and negative educational work, except this: that in so far as a man is positive himself, he does positive work. It is necessary to destroy reputations when they are lies. Peace be to their ashes. But war and fire until they be ashes. This is positive and constructive work. You cannot state your case without using popular illustrations, and in clearing the ground for justice and mercy, some little great man gets shown up as a make-believe. This is constructive work.
It is impossible to do harm to reform, unless you are taking some course that tends to put people to sleep. Strangely enough, the great outcry is made upon occasions when men are refusing to take such a course. This is due to the hypnotism of self-interest. “Don’t wake us up!” they cry, “We cannot stand the agony of it;” and the rising energy with which they speak wakes other sleepers. In the early stages of any new idea the only advertising it gets is denunciation. This is so much better than silence, that one may hail it as the dawn. You must speak till you draw blood. The agitators have always understood this. Such men as Wendell Phillips were not extravagant. They were practical men. Their business was to get heard. They used vitriol, but they were dealing with the hide of the rhinoceros.
If you look at the work of the anti-slavery people by the light of what they were trying to do, you will find that they had a very clear understanding of their task. The reason of some of them canted a little from the strain and stress; but they were so much nearer being right-minded than their contemporaries that we may claim them as respectable human beings. They were the rock on which the old politics split. They were a new force. As soon as they had gathered head enough to affect political issues, they broke every public man at the North by forcing him to take sides. There is not a man of the era whom they did not shatter. Finally their own leaders got into public life, and it was not till then that the new era began. The same thing is happening to-day. It is the function of the reformer to crack up any public man who dodges the issue of corruption, or who tries to ride two horses by remaining a straight party man and shouting reform. This is no one’s fault. It is a natural process. It is fate. Some fall on one side of the line, and some on the other. One gets the office, and the next loses it; but oblivion yawns for all of them. There is no cassia that can embalm their deeds; they can do nothing interesting, nothing that it lies in the power of the human mind to remember. Why is it that Calhoun’s Speeches are unreadable? He had the earnestness of a prophet and the strength almost of a Titan; but he was engaged in framing a philosophy to protect an interest. He was maintaining something that was not true. It was a fallacy. It was a pretence. It was a house built on the sands of temporary conditions. Such are the ideas of those middling good men, who profess honesty in just that degree which will keep them in office. Honesty beyond this point is, in their philosophy, incompatible with earthly conditions. These men must exist at present. They are an organic product of the times; they are samples of mediocrity. But they have nothing to offer to the curiosity of the next generation. No, not though their talent was employed in protecting an Empire—as it is now employed in eking out the supremacy of a disease in a country whose deeper health is beginning to throw the poison off.
Our public men are confronted with two systems of politics. They cannot hedge. If the question were suddenly to be lost in a riot, no doubt a good administrator might win applause, even a Tammany chief. But we have no riots. We have finished the war with Spain, and, unless foreign complications shall set in, we are about to sit down with the politicians over our domestic issue—theft. Are you for theft or against it? You can’t be both; and your conversation, the views you hold and express to your friends, are the test. It is only because politics affect or reflect these views that politics have any importance at all. Your agents—Croker, Hanna—are serving you faithfully now. Nothing else is to be heard at the clubs but the sound of little hammers riveting abuse.
There is another side to this shield that calls not for scorn but for pity. Have you ever been in need of money? Almost every man who enters our society joins it as a young man in need of money. His instincts are unsullied, his intellect is fresh and strong, but he must live. How comes it that the country is full of maimed human beings, of cynics and feeble good men, and outside of this no form of life except the diabolical intelligence of pure business?
How to make yourself needed,—it is the sycophant’s problem; and why should we expect a young American to act differently from a young Spaniard at the Court of Philip the Second? He must get on. He goes into a law office, and if he is offended at its dishonest practices he cannot speak. He soon accepts them. Thereafter he cannot see them. He goes into a newspaper office, the same; a banker’s, a merchant’s, a dry-goods’ shop. What has happened to these fellows at the end of three years, that their minds seem to be drying up? I have seen many men I knew in college grow more and more uninteresting from year to year. Is there something in trade that desiccates and flattens out, that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there is. It is not due to trade, but to intensity of self-seeking, combined with narrowness of occupation. If I had to make my way at the court of Queen Elizabeth, I should need more kinds of wits and more knowledge of human nature than in the New York button trade. No doubt I should be a preoccupied, cringing, and odious sort of person at a feudal festivity; but I should be a fascinating man of genius compared to John H. Painter, who at the age of thirty is making $15,000 a year by keeping his mouth shut and attending to business. Put a pressure gauge into Painter, and measure the business tension at New York in 1900. He is passing his youth in a trance over a game of skill, and thereby earning the respect and admiration of all men. Do not blame him. The great current of business force that passes through the port of New York has touched him, and he is rigid. There are hundreds of these fellows, and they make us think of the well-meaning young man who has to support his family, and who must compete against them for the confidence of his business patrons. Our standard of commercial honesty is set by that current. It is entirely the result of the competition that comes from everybody’s wanting to do the same thing.