Is it possible that tired men really wield a considerable power and influence in these American States so lately wrested from savagery? Confirmation of this reaches us through many channels. In politics we are assured that the tired business man is a serious obstructionist in the path of his less prosperous and less weary brethren engaged upon the pursuit of happiness and capable of enjoying it in successes that would seem contemptibly meagre to Smith. Thousands of Smiths who have not yet ripened for the German specialists are nevertheless tired enough to add to the difficulty of securing so simple a thing as reputable municipal government. It is because of Smith’s weariness and apathy that we are obliged to confess that no decent man will accept the office of mayor in our American cities.
In my early acquaintance with Smith—in those simple days when he had time to loaf in my office and talk politics—an ardent patriotism burned in him. He was proud of his ancestors who had not withheld their hand all the way from Lexington to Yorktown, and he used to speak with emotion of that dark winter at Valley Forge. He would look out of the window upon Washington Street and declare, with a fine sweep of the hand, that “We’ve got to keep all this; we’ve got to keep it for these people and for our children.” He had not been above sitting as delegate in city and state conventions, and he had once narrowly escaped a nomination for the legislature. The industry he owned and managed was a small affair and he knew all the employees by name. His lucky purchase of a patent that had been kicked all over the United States before the desperate inventor offered it to him had sent his fortunes spinning into millions within ten years. Our cautious banker who had vouchsafed Smith a reasonable guarded credit in the old days had watched, with the mild cynical smile peculiar to conservative bank presidents, the rapid enrollment of Smith’s name in the lists of directors of some of the solidest corporations known to Wall Street. It is a long way from Washington Street to Wall Street, and men who began life with more capital than Smith never cease marveling at the ease with which he effected the transition. Some who continue where he left them in the hot furrows stare gloomily after him and exclaim upon the good luck that some men have. Smith’s abrupt taking-off would cause at least a momentary chill in a thousand safety-vault boxes. Smith’s patriotism, which in the old days, when he liked to speak of America as the republic of the poor, and when he knew most of the “Commemoration Ode” and all of the “Gettysburg Address” by heart, is far more concrete than it used to be. When Smith visits Washington during the sessions of Congress the country is informed of it. It is he who scrutinizes new senators and passes upon their trustworthiness. And it was Smith who, after one of these inspections, said of a member of our upper chamber that, “He’s all right; he speaks our language,” meaning not the language of the “Commemoration Ode” or the “Gettysburg Address,” but a recondite dialect understood only at the inner gate of the money-changers.
IV
No place was ever pleasanter in the old days than the sitting-room of Smith’s house. It was the coziest of rooms and gave the lie to those who have maintained that civilization is impossible around a register. A happy, contented family life existed around that square of perforated iron in the floor of the Smiths’ sitting-room. In the midst of arguments on life, letters, the arts, politics, and what-not, Smith would, as the air grew chill toward midnight, and when Mrs. Smith went to forage for refreshments in the pantry, descend to the cellar to renew the flagging fires of the furnace with his own hands. The purchase of a new engraving, the capture of a rare print, was an event to be celebrated by the neighbors. We went to the theatre sometimes, and kept track of the affairs of the stage; and lectures and concerts were not beneath us. Mrs. Smith played Chopin charmingly on a piano Smith had given her for a Christmas present when Fanny was three. They were not above belonging to our neighborhood book and magazine club, and when they bought a book it was a good one. I remember our discussions of George Meredith and Hardy and Howells, and how we saved Stockton’s stories to enjoy reading them in company around the register. A trip to New York was an event for the Smiths in those days as well as for the rest of us, to be delayed until just the right moment for seeing the best plays, and an opera, with an afternoon carefully set apart for the Metropolitan Museum. We were glad the Smiths could go, even if the rest of us couldn’t; for they told us all so generously of their adventures when they came back! They kept a “horse and buggy,” and Mrs. Smith used to drive to the factory with Fanny perched beside her to bring Smith home at the end of his day’s work.
In those days the Smiths presented a picture before which one might be pardoned for lingering in admiration. I shall resent any suggestions that I am unconsciously writing them down as American bourgeois with the contemptuous insinuations that are conveyed by that term. Nor were they Philistines, but sound, wholesome, cheerful Americans, who bought their eggs direct from “the butterman” and kept a jug of buttermilk in the ice-box. I assert that Smiths of their type were and are, wherever they still exist, an encouragement and a hope to all who love their America. They are the Americans to whom Lincoln became as one of Plutarch’s men, and for whom Longfellow wrote “The Children’s Hour,” and on whom Howells smiles quizzically and with complete understanding. Thousands of us knew thousands of these Smiths only a few years ago, all the way from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. I linger upon them affectionately as I have known and loved them in the Ohio Valley, but I have enjoyed glimpses of them in Kansas City and Omaha, Minneapolis and Detroit, and know perfectly well that I should find them realizing to the full life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in many other regions,—for example, with only slight differences of background, in Richmond, Virginia, and Burlington, Vermont. And in all these places some particular Smith is always moving to Chicago or Boston or New York on his way to a sanatorium or Bad Neuheim and a German specialist! Innumerable Smiths, not yet so prosperous as the old friend I encountered in Berlin, are abandoning their flower-gardens and the cozy verandas (sacred to neighborhood confidences on the long summer evenings) and their gusty registers for compact and steam-heated apartments with only the roof-garden overhead as a breathing-place.
There seems to be no field in which the weary Smith is not exercising a baneful influence. We have fallen into the habit of laying many of our national sins at his door, and usually with reason. His hand is hardly concealed as he thrusts it nervously through the curtains of legislative chambers, state and national. He invades city halls and corrupts municipal councils. Even the fine arts are degraded for his pleasure. Smith, it seems, is too weary from his day’s work to care for dramas
“That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe.”
He is one of the loyalest patrons of that type of beguilement known as the “musical comedy,” which in its most engaging form is a naughty situation sprinkled with cologne water and set to waltz time. Still, if he dines at the proper hour at a Fifth Avenue restaurant and eats more and drinks more than he should (to further the hardening of his arteries for the German specialist), he may arrive late and still hear the tune every one on Broadway is whistling. The girl behind the book-counter knows Smith a mile off, and hands him at once a novel that has a lot of “go” to it, or one wherein “smart” people assembled in house-parties for week-ends, amuse themselves by pinning pink ribbons on the Seventh Commandment. If the illustrations are tinted and the first page opens upon machine-gun dialogue, the sale is effected all the more readily. Or, reluctant to tackle a book of any sort, he may gather up a few of those magazines whose fiction jubilantly emphasizes the least noble passions of man. And yet my Smith delighted, in those old days around the register, in Howells’s clean, firm stroke; and we were always quoting dear Stockton—“black stockings for sharks”—“put your board money in the ginger jar.” What a lot of silly, happy, comfortable geese we were!
It seems only yesterday that the first trayful of cocktails jingled into a parlor in my town as a prelude to dinner; and I recall the scandalous reports of that innovation which passed up and down the maple-arched thoroughfares that give so sober and cloistral an air to our residential area. When that first tray appeared at our elbows, just before that difficult moment when we gentlemen of the provinces, rather conscious at all times of our dress-coats, are wondering whether it is the right or left arm we should offer the lady we are about to take in, we were startled, as though the Devil had invaded the domestic sanctuary and perched himself on the upright piano. Nothing is more depressing than the thought that all these Smiths, many of whose fathers slept in the rain and munched hard-tack for a principle in the sixties, are unable to muster an honest appetite, but must pucker their stomachs with a tonic before they can swallow their daily bread. Perhaps our era’s great historian will be a stomach specialist whose pages, bristling with statistics and the philosophy thereof, will illustrate the undermining and honeycombing of our institutions by gin and bitters.