Imagine a company of people on a voyage. They play whist with one another for dimes, and they spend all their money on the steward and continue to play with counters, and the ship goes to wreck, and they sit on the beach and continue to play with pebbles. That is American politics. The whole thing is one gigantic sham, one transcendent fraud.
It makes no difference which man is made president; it makes no difference which is governor. There is no choice between McKinley and Bryan, between Republicanism and Democracy. There is no difference between them. They are one thing. They both and all of them are part of the machinery by which the government of a most dishonest nation is carried on, for the financial benefit of certain parties,—certain thousands of men who have bank accounts and eat and drink and bring up their families on the proceeds of this complicated swindle.
There is no reality in a single phrase uttered in politics, no meaning in one single word of any of it. There is no man in public life who stands for anything. They are shadows; they are phantasmagoria. At best they cater to the better elements; at worst they frankly subserve the worst. There is no one who stands for his own ideas himself, by himself, a man. If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic party or the Republican party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era,—then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem, and you must be educated and drawn forward towards real life. This process is going on. As the community returns to life, it sees the natural world for a moment and then forgets it. The blood flushes the brain and then recedes. You yourself voted once against both parties, when you thought you could win, and when you were excited. You quoted Isaiah and I know not what poetry, and were out and out committed to principle; but to-day you are cold and hopeless. At present, hope is a mystery to you. Nevertheless the utility of those early reform movements survives. They heated the imagination of the people till the people had a momentary vision of truths which not all of them forgot; and so each year the temperature has been higher, the mind of the community clearer.
We must not regard those broken reeds, the renegade leaders of reform movements, as villains; though the mere record of their words and conduct might prove them such. They have been men emerging from a mist. They see clearly for a moment, and then clouds sweep before them. Vanity, selfishness, ambition, tradition, habit, intervene like a fog. They have been betrayed, too, by the fickle public, that would not stand by them when in trouble. In the recapture of any institution by the forces of honesty there are trenches that get filled by slaughtered honor.
This whole revolution means the invasion of politics by new men. At first they are tyros, unstable, untried, well-meaning fellows. Half of them crack in the baking. But there are more coming, and the fibre is growing tougher and the eyes clearer; soon we shall have men. A great passion is soon to replace the feeble conscientious motive that has hitherto brought the new men forward: ambition,—the ambition to stand for ideas, for ideas only, and to get heard. We have almost forgotten that public life is the natural ambition of every young man. Conditions have made it contemptible. But these struggles signify that a change in those conditions has already begun. Your work and mine may be summed up in one word. Make it possible for a young man to go into public life untarnished, and as an enemy to every extant evil. You must have men who will not go except on these terms. The times herald such men. They will appear. We must prepare for them.
The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart. The instant he declares war, every inducement is offered to make him stop. “Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail” intervene. The instant he stops fighting he is allied with the enemy: he is bought up by prejudice or by fatigue. He begins to realize the importance of particular visible institutions, as if their sole value did not come from the fraction of unselfishness they represent. He rushes headlong into trade, and thenceforth can see his country only as a series of trade interests. He gets into some church and begins to value its organization, or into some party and begins to value its past, or into some club and begins to value his friends’ feelings. The consequence is that you may search Christendom and hardly find a man who is free. The advance of the world, like the improvement of our local politics, has always been the work of young men. It is done by men before their minds have been worn into ruts by particular businesses, or their sight shortened by the study of near things. What we love in the young is not their youth, but their force. The energy that runs through them makes them sensitive. They feel the importance of remote things, and infer the relations of the present to the future more truly than their elders. They are touched by hints. The direct language of humanity is plain and native to them. The invisible waves of force which do as a matter of fact rule the world, using its fictions and its phrases as mere transmitting-plates, strike keenly upon the heart of the youth, and the vibrations of instinctive passion that shake his frame are the response of a strong creature to the laws of its universe. This unlearned knowledge of good and evil is like the response of the eyes to light or of the tongue to the taste of a fruit. It was not indoctrinated; it is a reaction to a stimulus.
So long as the world shall last, men will be writing books in order to explain and justify the instincts; inventing theologies and ethical codes, and projecting political programs to advance and confirm them.
If you take up some particular matter and begin to trace out its consequences upon mankind, you find yourself forced boldly to embrace the sum of all human destiny. We cannot follow out this course in detail. We see only tendency; we see only influence. Enlarge our horizon as we will, we cannot live out the lives of all future generations, and thus furnish an answer to the first caviller who interrupts our argument with a “cui bono.” The generous impulses of youth represent a vision of consequences. They take in more of the future at one glance than a philosopher can state in a year.
Certainly, so far as we can follow out the threads of influence, the lines seem to converge. They make a figure and point to a conclusion exactly upon that spot in the firmament where instinct would place it. If philosophy gives us a diagram, the rest of life fills it up, and embellishes it with infinite illustration. The proofs multiply, and are hurled in upon us from all quarters of life and all provinces of endeavor. The anecdotes and fables of the world, its drama, its poetry and fiction, its religion and piety, its domestic teaching and its monuments support this instinct, and describe the same figure. Further still, there is not a man who does not reveal it in his soul’s anatomy: so much so that upon every occasion except where his interests are touched, he is for virtue, and even where they are touched, it is only a question of a few degrees more heat to dissolve the habits and prejudices of a lifetime, and make him take off his coat and go into a war or a political campaign.