Practical Agitation

by John Jay Chapman

It is the ambition of the agitator to use the machinery of government to make men more unselfish. In so far as he succeeds in this, he is creating a living church, the only sort of State church that would be entirely at one with our system, because it would be merely a representation in the formal government of a spirit abroad among the people.

Campaign platforms are merely creeds. “I believe in Civil Service Reform” is a way of saying “I do not believe in theft,” and the phrase was a fragmentary and incomplete formulation of the greater truth. It was the sign that a movement was beginning among the people due to reawakening instinct, reawakening sensibility. It was the forerunner of all those changes for the better that have been spreading over our administrative government during the last thirty years. A quiet revolution has been going forward under our eyes, recorded step by step. It is only because our standards have been going up faster than the reforms came in that we believe the evils are growing worse. Such changes go on all the time all over the world, but the value and rarity of this one come from its unity and coherence. Such a thing might happen in Germany or in England, but you could not disentangle the forces.

Thirty years ago politics was thought to be no occupation for a gentleman. It was a matter of bar-rooms, ballot-box-stuffing, rolls of dirty bills. You had as little to do with it as possible. You voted your party ticket, you paid your taxes. You bribed the ashman and the policeman at your uptown house, and the clerk of the court, the inspector, the custom-house agent, and the commissioner of jurors at your office.

That subtle change of attitude in the citizen towards his public duty which is now in progress, has in it something of the religious. The whole matter becomes comprehensible the moment we cease to think of it as politics, and see in it a widespread and perfectly natural reaction against an era of wickedness. Had our framework of government afforded no outlet to the force, had our ills been irremediably crystallized into formal tyranny, we should perhaps have witnessed great revivalist upheavals, sacraments, saints, prophets, prostrations, and adoration. As it is, we have seen deadly pamphlets, schedules, enactments, documents which it required our whole attention and our whole time to understand; and behind each of them a remorseless interrogator with a white cravat and a face of iron. What motive drives them on? What oil fills their lamps? Who feeds them? These horrid things they bring, these instruments forged by unremitting toil, technical, insufferable,—they are the cure. With such levers, and with them only, can the stones be lifted off the hearts of men. They are the alternatives of revolution.

“Reform” may have a thousand meanings, and be used to cover a thousand projects of doubtful utility. But with us it has a definite meaning. When the foreigner says, “Ah, but is your reform the right remedy?” he thinks it is a question of policy, or of the incidence of a tax. He supposes there is an intellectual question. But with us the problem is how to protect an attorney against a dishonest judge; how to stop the sheriff from stealing a fund, pending the litigation.

What we want to do, what we are doing, is to get rid of gross malpractices, gross theft, gross abuse of public trust. It is waste of time to expend learned argument on a judge who has been bought. The litigants must join forces and get rid of that judge before they can talk. Of course we know that the real trouble with our politics is that these attorneys have themselves bribed the judge and share in the division of their clients’ property. It is to questions of this kind that the conscience of the country has been drawn.

There is nothing peculiarly sacred about politics, but the history of reform movements during the last few years furnishes such striking and wonderful illustrations of human nature that it is worth study.

A few men have a desire, a hope of improving some evil. They stagger towards it and fall. The impulse is always good. The mistakes made are progressive. They record the past; they outline the future. If you draw an arrow through them, it will point north.

If you arrange the reform movements against Tammany Hall in a series, and consider them minutely, you will find that the earlier ones are comparatively corrupt, sporadic, disorganized, ignorant, and shortsighted in purpose. They have steadily become more honest, more frequent, more coherent, more intelligent and ambitious. If you examine any one of them, it would be impossible to misplace it in the series. Looking more closely, you see the reason. The earlier the movement, the more zealously do its leaders imitate the methods of current politics. Each movement represents the philosophy of its era. We have had: 1. The frankly corrupt era (fighting the devil with fire). 2. The compromise era (buying reform). 3. The educational era, which began two years ago, after Low was defeated, when people said they were glad of the movement, in spite of the defeat. Note this, that Low did not lead a lost cause, nor was any belief in lost causes at the bottom of his movement. But in making the best of his defeat, many minds stumbled into philosophy. And this illustrates the progress of an idea. People will accept it as an explanation of the past before they will take it as a guide to the future. It glimmers before them at a moment when they need comfort, and vanishes in the light of a comfortable habit or prejudice. This apparition of the educational idea flitted across New York and took root in many minds.

Now the smoky torch of reform has passed from hand to hand, and is beginning to burn brighter. How could the original darkness give forth more than a gleam? All progress is experimental. The architects discovered by practice that the arch would support itself. Their earlier efforts were tentative. You can see what notion they had in mind, as they very gradually learned how to subserve the laws of gravity and tension. Each improvement is qualified by its author’s limitations, but shows a gain as toward the immediate past. You are following the steps of the groping and fumbling mind of man, fettered at every point by his own conceptions, moving each time towards a bolder generalization, each stride forward exactly proportionate to the breadth of thought on which it is calculated.