It is true that your confirmation and support are managed through the mechanism of blindness. All the evil in the world receives its chief support from the people whose only connection with it is that they do not fight it, nor see it. Where politics is involved scarcely a man in America knows the difference between right and wrong. Our mayoralty contest five years ago would have left Lot searching for a man who could tell black from white. It was a clear moral issue. But it arose in politics: we could not see it. That we have intellectual cataract is entirely due to the habit of condoning embezzlement. It is a secondary form of the endemic theft, caught by the by-standers. The best people in town had it. If they had been lifting their hands against theft during the preceding years, they never would have caught it.
Of course we support all the good in the world, as well as all the evil; and the ratio in which we do both changes at every moment. It radiates forth from us, and is read correctly by every baby as he passes in his perambulator. Close thinking, and fresh observation of things too familiar to be noticed, bring us to this point.
Now, just as no complexity of institutions affects the transfer of virtue, so none affects the transfer and propagation of vice. Yesterday you were all for virtue. You were for leading a revolution against the bosses, and were ready to work and subscribe and vote. You were a man with the heart of a man. But to-day you are chop-fallen. “The thing cannot be done. It is not the year.” The degradation of your character is seen in your low spirits, and in the jaded and sophistical commonplaces you pour forth. I know the academical reasons for this change in you. I can express it in terms of ballot-law and civil service. But what is it that really has happened?
The power that has struck you was focalized the day before yesterday in the office of some law-broking politicians; and the direct rays of base passion have struck straight through stone walls and constitutions, and, falling upon you, have stopped your wheels. In them it was avarice and ambition. In you it is doubt. A drowsy inertia overcomes you, a blindness of the will. That is what has really happened. The rest is illusion and metaphysical talk. See, now, the real curse of injustice; it takes away the sight from the eyes, and that in a night.
Is it not perfectly natural that Tammany Hall should be everywhere, at all tables, in all churches, in all consciences, when these electrical currents run between man and man and connect them so easily?
I read in the newspaper that a well-known man is at Albany in the interests of a gas deal. He cannot get his way in the city, and is putting up a job with the legislature. I see the thing going through,—a thing utterly cynical, utterly corrupt. No paper will explain it because it cannot be explained without names; besides, the names own the papers. Everybody understands it; nobody minds it. Is any statute here at fault? Will any legislation cure this? If the moral sensibility of our people should become tensified by twenty per cent in twenty-four hours, twenty per cent of all our iniquities in every department would cease in forty-eight hours. Government is carried on by the lightning of personal suggestion which flashes through the community from day to day and from moment to moment. Those things are done which are demanded or are tolerated at the instant they are done.
I read in a newspaper that a syndicate has been formed to light the city. It is backed by the men who control the city administration, and they are now blackmailing the existing company to its ruin. Can I escape the knowledge of this thing? Alas, too easily: I own stock in it.
At first we think the legislature makes the laws, then we see it is done by a cabal, then by people behind the cabal, finally by the million bonds of popular prejudice which tie each man up with the times.
Look closely, take some particular man, and consider why it is that he does not spend his whole time in fighting for virtue. It will turn out, that in some form or other, he is a beneficiary of these evils, and has not the energy to fight them. One man depends upon the status quo for his living, the next is held by affection for his friends, by the ties of old prejudice, by inertia, by hopelessness. Which of them is the more deeply injured victim of tyranny,—the active self-seeker or the listless man, the Tammany boy or the American gentleman?
Every man bears a direct and discoverable share in the responsibility. A janitor keeps his place through Tammany influence, a young lawyer gets business by keeping his mouth shut. Follow out the lines leading from any man, no matter how obscure he is, and they will lead you to the ante-chamber where gigantic business has its offices, where the highest functionaries of commerce and politics meet. The business world is all one organization. It is a sort of secret society, a great web. No matter where you touch it, the same spiders come out.