The rumpus among the Republican heelers—following so slight a cause as the action of five or six citizens who took the field with a ticket of their own—resembled the action of a geyser when a cake of soap is thrown into it—rumbling—followed by terrific vomiting.
A little practical discipline among the reformers is all that is required to make them formidable,—the discipline of experience, of acting together, of personal trust. This is to be acquired only in the field of action.
It is encouraging to find how small a body of men it takes—even at the present moment—to upset the calculations of the politicians. The force that made the Republicans afraid did not lie in the parcel of men who threw in the soap. It came from the great public. The episode showed that the Republicans were afraid to appeal to the country. They knew that their cabal was almost as much hated as Tammany Hall.
There is always great difficulty in this world as to who shall bell the cat; but conventions of mice do not further the matter. The way to do it is for a parcel of mice to take their political lives in their hands and proceed to do it.
The real meaning of all these movements will not be perceived till their work has been done. As history, the cause and course of them will be so plain that a word will suffice to explain them. In the light of history it will be clear that the improvement in the personnel of our public life was due to the demands of the public—expressed in citizen’s movements. We have already reached a point where neither party dares appeal to the public—as they did ten years ago—on purely party grounds. Roosevelt and Van Wyck both claimed to be men superior to the average partisan. The advance of political thought has already made the dullest man perceive the Machine within his own party, and every day spreads the news that there is only a single machine in all our politics. The destruction of this machine will not be like the destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII., but it will consist in the substitution of new timber for old in the parties themselves.
Any one who looks for an expulsion of Tammany Hall like the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, will be disappointed. There will always be a Tammany Hall. But it will be run by respectable men, who will look back with wonder and disgust upon this period, and who will give the public an honest administration because the public has demanded it.
II
BETWEEN ELECTIONS
An election is like a flash of lightning at midnight. You get an instantaneous photograph of what every man is doing. You see his real relation toward his government. But an election happens only once a year. Government goes on day and night.
It is hard breaking down the popular fallacy that there is such a thing as “politics,” governed by peculiar conditions, which must be understood and respected; that the whole thing is a mystic avocation, run as a trade by high priests and low priests, and is remote from our daily life. Our system of party government has been developed with the aim of keeping the control in the hands of professionals. Technicalities have been multiplied, and the rules of the game have become more and more complex. There exists, consequently, an unformulated belief that the corruption of politics is something by itself. Yet there probably never was a civilization where the mesh of all powers and interests was so close. It is like the interlocking of roots in a swamp. Such density and cohesion were never seen in any epoch, such a mat and tangle of personalities, where every man is tied up with the fibres of every other. If you take an axe or a saw, and cut a clean piece out of it anywhere, you will maim every member of society. How idle, then, even to think of politics as a subject by itself, or of the corruptions of the times as localized!