And, again, "The tropical belt of sin into which we are now sweeping is largely impersonal. The hurt passes into that vague mass, 'the public,' and is there lost to view. Hence it does not take a Borgia to knead 'chalk and alum and plaster' into the loaf, seeing that one cannot know just who will eat that loaf. The purveyor of spurious life-preservers need not be a Cain. The owner of rotten tenements, whose 'pull' enables him to ignore the orders of the Health Department, fore-dooms babies, it is true, but for all that, he is no Herod.
"Often there are no victims. If the crazy hulk sent out for 'just one more trip' meets with fair weather, all is well. Briber and grafter are now 'good men,' and would have passed for virtuous in the American community of seventy years ago. Therefore, people do not always see that boodling is treason; that blackmail is piracy, that tax-dodging is larceny. The cloven hoof hides in patent leather, and to-day, as in Hosea's time, the people are destroyed for lack of knowledge."
Let us see to it that our children are not so destroyed.
In the old abolition days, Mr. Emerson wrote: "What an education in the public spirit of Massachusetts have been the speeches and reading of our public schools! Every district school has been an anti-slavery convention for these two or three years last past."
Special policies cannot often be taught like this in the modern public school, but the broad principles of pure politics can and should be.
For instance, a lesson in Civil Service management may be given without once uttering those words, simply by teaching the sentiment well uttered by Ruskin: "The first necessity of social life is the clearness of the national conscience in enforcing the law,—that he should keep who has justly earned."
Children can be taught the dangers, not only to their principles, but their worldly fortunes, of office-seeking and of making a profession of politics. The child of wealth should be especially instructed in his duty to look after the affairs of his own town, county, state and nation. The man whose powers are strained to the utmost in order to support and educate his family, can of necessity give little time to the searching out of civic wrongs and their remedies. The well-to-do citizen must give all the more to make up for the limitations of his poorer neighbor.
Children can be taught, too, something of the protean forms of bribery, the schemes for trading votes; the duty of every voter to vote and do jury-work; the need of looking at every question from both sides; of avoiding blind partisanship; and much of the rest of the elementary ethics of politics.
And, again, it is upon the mother that this patriotic duty must chiefly devolve. As with all of her training, she may often feel that the work is slow and uncertain, but she may well take to heart the encouraging words of the poet:
"Thou canst not see grass grow, how sharp soe'er thou be;
Yet that the grass has grown, thou presently shall see.
So, though thou canst not see thy work now prospering, know
The fruit of every work-time without fail shall show."