In discussions under captions similar to mine it is often maintained that railways, telegraphs, telephones, and newspapers are so knitting us together, that soon we shall all be keyed to a metropolitan pitch. The proof adduced in support of this is the most trivial, but it strikes me as wholly undesirable that we should all be ironed out and conventionalized. In the matter of dress, for example, the women of our town used to take their fashions from “Godey’s” and “Peterson’s” via Cincinnati; but now that we are only eighteen hours from New York, with a well-traveled path from the Wabash to Paris, my counselors among the elders declare that the tone of our society—if I may use so perilous a word—has changed little from our good old black alpaca days. The hobble skirt receives prompt consideration in the “Main” street of any town, and is viewed with frank curiosity, but it is only a one day’s wonder. A lively runaway or the barbaric yawp of a new street fakir may dethrone it at any time.
New York and Boston tailors solicit custom among us semi-annually, but nothing is so stubborn as our provincial distrust of fine raiment. I looked with awe, in my boyhood, upon a pair of mammoth blue-jeans trousers that were flung high from a flagstaff in the centre of Indianapolis, in derision of a Democratic candidate for governor, James D. Williams, who was addicted to the wearing of jeans. The Democrats sagaciously accepted the challenge, made “honest blue jeans” the battle-cry, and defeated Benjamin Harrison, the “kid-glove” candidate of the Republicans. Harmless demagoguery this, or bad judgment on the part of the Republicans; and yet I dare say that if the sartorial issue should again become acute in our politics the banner of bifurcated jeans would triumph now as then. A Hoosier statesman who to-day occupies high office once explained to me his refusal of sugar for his coffee by remarking that he didn’t like to waste sugar that way; he wanted to keep it for his lettuce! I do not urge sugared lettuce as symbolizing our higher provincialism, but mayonnaise may be poison to men who are nevertheless competent to construe and administer law.
It is much more significant that we are all thinking about the same things at the same time, than that Farnam Street, Omaha, and Fifth Avenue, New York, should vibrate to the same shade of necktie. The distribution of periodicals is so managed that California and Maine cut the leaves of their magazines on the same day. Rural free delivery has hitched the farmer’s wagon to the telegraph-office, and you can’t buy his wife’s butter now until he has scanned the produce market in his newspaper. This immediacy of contact does not alter the provincial point of view. New York and Texas, Oregon and Florida will continue to see things at different angles, and it is for the good of all of us that this is so. We have no national political, social, or intellectual centre. There is no “season” in New York, as in London, during which all persons distinguished in any of these particulars meet on common ground. Washington is our nearest approach to such a meeting-place, but it offers only short vistas. We of the country visit Boston for the symphony, or New York for the opera, or Washington to view the government machine at work, but nowhere do interesting people representative of all our ninety millions ever assemble under one roof. All our capitals are, as Lowell put it, “fractional,” and we shall hardly have a centre while our country is so nearly a continent.
Nothing in our political system could be wiser than our dispersion into provinces. Sweep from the map the lines that divide the States and we should huddle like sheep suddenly deprived of the protection of known walls and flung upon the open prairie. State lines and local pride are in themselves a pledge of stability. The elasticity of our system makes possible a variety of governmental experiments by which the whole country profits. We should all rejoice that the parochial mind is so open, so eager, so earnest, so tolerant. Even the most buckramed conservative on the eastern coast-line, scornful of the political follies of our far-lying provinces, must view with some interest the dallyings of Oregon with the Referendum, and of Des Moines with the Commission System. If Milwaukee wishes to try socialism, the rest of us need not complain. Democracy will cease to be democracy when all its problems are solved and everybody votes the same ticket.
States that produce the most cranks are prodigal of the corn that pays the dividends on the railroads the cranks despise. Indiana’s amiable feeling toward New York is not altered by her sister’s rejection or acceptance of the direct primary, a benevolent device of noblest intention, under which, not long ago, in my own commonwealth, my fellow citizens expressed their distrust of me with unmistakable emphasis. It is no great matter, but in open convention also I have perished by the sword. Nothing can thwart the chastening hand of a righteous people.
All passes; humor alone is the touchstone of democracy. I search the newspapers daily for tidings of Kansas, and in the ways of Oklahoma I find delight. The Emporia “Gazette” is quite as patriotic as the Springfield “Republican” or the New York “Post,” and to my own taste, far less depressing. I subscribed for a year to the Charleston “News and Courier,” and was saddened by the tameness of its sentiments; for I remember (it must have been in 1883) the shrinking horror with which I saw daily in the Indiana Republican organ a quotation from Wade Hampton to the effect that “these are the same principles for which Lee and Jackson fought four years on Virginia’s soil.” Most of us are entertained when Colonel Watterson rises to speak for Kentucky and invokes the star-eyed goddess. When we call the roll of the States, if Malvolio answer for any, let us suffer him in patience and rejoice in his yellow stockings. “God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.”
Every community has its dissenters, protestants, kickers, cranks; the more the merrier. My town has not lacked impressive examples, and I early formed a high resolve to strive for membership in their execrated company. George W. Julian,—one of the noblest of Hoosiers,—who had been the Free-Soil candidate for Vice-President in 1852, a delegate to the first Republican convention, five times a member of Congress, a supporter of Greeley’s candidacy, and a Democrat in the consulship of Cleveland, was a familiar figure in our streets. In 1884 I was dusting law-books in an office where mug-wumpery flourished, and where the iniquities of the tariff, Matthew Arnold’s theological opinions, and the writings of Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley were discussed at intervals in the days’ business.
IV
Many complain that we Americans give too much time to politics, but there could be no safer outlet for that “added drop of nervous fluid” which Colonel Higginson found in us and turned over to Matthew Arnold for further analysis. No doubt many voices will cry in the wilderness before we reach the promised land. A people which has been fed on the Bible is bound to hear the rumble of Pharaoh’s chariots. It is in the blood to resent the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely. The winter evenings are long on the prairies, and we must always be fashioning a crown for Cæsar or rehearsing his funeral rites. No great danger can ever seriously menace the nation so long as the remotest citizen clings to his faith that he is a part of the governmental mechanism and can at any time throw it out of adjustment if it doesn’t run to suit him. He can go into the court-house and see the men he helped to place in office; or if they were chosen in spite of him, he pays his taxes just the same and waits for another chance to turn the rascals out.
Mr. Bryce wrote: “This tendency to acquiescence and submission; this sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement may be studied but cannot be turned, I have ventured to call the Fatalism of the Multitude.” It is, I should say, one of the most encouraging phenomena of the score of years that has elapsed since Mr. Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” appeared, that we have grown much less conscious of the crushing weight of the mass. It has been with something of a child’s surprise in his ultimate successful manipulation of a toy whose mechanism had baffled him that we have begun to realize that, after all, the individual counts. The pressure of the mass will yet be felt, but in spite of its persistence there are abundant signs that the individual is asserting himself more and more, and even the undeniable acceptance of collectivist ideas in many quarters helps to prove it. With all our faults and defaults of understanding,—populism, free silver, Coxey’s army, and the rest of it,—we of the West have not done so badly. Be not impatient with the young man Absalom; the mule knows his way to the oak tree!