The boss system, then, appears as the visible part of all the private selfishness in America. It is a great religion of self-interest, with its hierarchy, its chapels, its propaganda, and its confessors in every home. You yourself support it. I saw last week, at your table, a magnate whose business conduct you deplore, and to-day I heard a young man make the comment, that there was no use fighting the current so long as social influence could be bought. Do not accuse Tammany Hall; you yourself have corrupted that young man. So long as you think you can circumvent the laws of force, you will remain a pillar in the temple of iniquity.
But look closer still at each of those individuals, and see just what it is he is giving as the purchase money. One man gives $25,000 to pay a president’s private debts, and goes as minister to England; another gives merely his name to indorse a doubtful candidate for the assembly, and receives prospective good will from the organization. What is this great market overt where every one can get what he wants? The syndicate can get the franchises, and the aldermen the cash. No one is too small to be served, or so great as to require nothing. Upon what principle is this monstrous bazaar, this clearing-house for self-interest, conducted? It is as large as the United States—the transcontinental railroads use it—and so well managed that I can get my friend a job as the secretary of a reform movement. What is it that makes this universal shop run so smoothly? It is hooked together simply on business principles. The price you pay is always the rubbing of somebody the right way; the thing you get is advancement or personal comfort of some sort. It has happened, that by the operation of commercial forces, the whole of America’s seventy million people have been polarized into self-seekers; and our total condition is visibly Vanity Fair. You can actually follow the rays of power from the individual to the boss. All the evil in the world is seen to be in league. Embezzlement and laziness, selfish ambition and prejudice, cruelty and timidity here openly play into each other’s hands, support and console each other. Nay, every atom of vice, every impulse of malice or cupidity, can be shown up as a tendon or a sinew of the great organization of selfish forces. It is as if a magic glass had been superposed upon the continent, and, looking down through it, upon the motives of men, all complexity vanished, and we saw all the evil forces pulling one way.
The same thing has always been true in every society; but the names, powers, superstitions have been so extremely complicated that no one could follow the laws of interlocking motive, except by inference and prophetic insight. Take the case of a very selfish man fighting his way up through society in the reign of Louis XVIII. He meets a Bourbon influence, an ecclesiastical influence, a Napoleonic influence, a republican influence. He grapples with every man he meets, using the hooks of self-interest in that man. The forces at work under Louis XVIII. were as simple as with us. Only the nomenclature is different, and more complex. It is easy in America to see the working of one man’s selfishness upon another’s. Let alone the market overt, it is easy to trace the subtle social relations, when they are for the bad. It was easy to follow the effect of your conduct in asking the dishonest business magnate to dinner, because the young man spoke of it. He was shocked and injured. But we also found out by the episode that before you did the thing, you were really a factor for good in his life, holding up his conscience and his ideals.
The inexpressible subtlety in the mechanism of man makes the transmission of the force for good as easy as that of the force for evil. They are of the same character, and very often flow through the same channels. There is no more mystery in the one case than in the other.
Consider what is done in the course of any practical movement for reform. A bad bill is pending at Albany. In order to beat it, a party of men whose characters are trusted, get on a train, and the whole State watches them proceed to Albany. This is often enough to defeat a measure. The good their pilgrimage does, is done then and there instantly, by example, by suggestion. If, when they get to Albany, they sell out their cause, the harm they do is done then and there by example, by suggestion. They make some concession which lessens friction but suggests Tammany Hall. This is the only part of the transaction that reaches the great public. Ask the laboring man and he will give you a digest of the whole episode in a shrug. If a reform candidate is running on the platform “Thou shalt not steal,” and the boss desires to corrupt him, the boss asks him to drop in for a chat. If he goes, every one hears of it the next day, and every one is a little corrupted himself. A thousand well-meaning men say he did right. Had he resisted, these same men would have cried “Bravo!” and thereafter taken a higher view of human nature. It is by a succession of such minute shocks of good or bad example that communities are affected. The truth seems to be that our lives are ruled by laws of influence which are in themselves exceedingly direct. But the operation of them is concealed from us by our preoccupation over details.
It is impossible to regard these matters in too simple a light. Nothing is ever involved except the contagious impulse that makes one man yawn when he sees another man yawn. Both the good and the evil in the world run upon the winds. Moses’ habit of falling upon his face before the congregation, and calling God to witness that he could lead them no longer, was not a political trick done to frighten the people into submission by the threat of abandoning them. It was a sincere act of devotion; but it was also the most powerful form of appeal. He did the act; they followed in it, and thus made him absolute. Lincoln’s anecdotes and fables consisted of nothing but suggestion. They were one source of his power. The first thing a tyrant does is to suppress cartoons. Here we have something that is often sheer pantomime, and yet it is one of the most effective vehicles in the world. It was the only thing Platt could not stand. Within two years he has tried to stop it by legislation.
If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people. In literature this is obvious. The more far-reaching any truth is, the shorter grow its hieroglyphics. The great truths can only be given in hints, phrases, and parables. They lie in universal experience, and any comment belittles them. They are like the magnetic poles that can only be pointed out with a needle. Take any profound saying about life, and see if it does not imply short-hand, a sort of telegraphy as the ordinary means of communication between men. “He that loseth his life shall save it.” Here we have a poem, a system of ethics and a psychology. Or take any bit of worldly wisdom, “Money talks.” Here we have the whole philosophy of materialism. Does any one imagine that political bargains are reduced to writing? It would be injurious to the conscience. They are made by the merest hints on all sides. Every one is left free.
The extreme case of the power of suggestion is seen in the stock-market, where a rumor that Banker A has dined with Railroad President B drives values up or down. Cleveland’s Venezuela message makes a panic. The different parts of the financial world live, from day to day, in instantaneous and throbbing communication. This is one side of the popular life. Its thermometer is sensitive, and records one thousandth of a degree as readily as the political thermometer records a single degree. But the principle is the same. All the people run the stock-market, and all the people run politics. There has never been any difficulty in reaching the whole people with ideas. Even a private man can do it. But he must act them out.
VI
PRINCIPLES (continued).
Suppose a small child steals jam in the pantry. So long as he pretends that he did not do it, or did not know it was wrong, he suffers a certain oppression.