But so it was. These great old mansions set back in their tremendous spaces of lawn were seeing the very last of their former glory. The business heart of the city was apparently overtaking them, and these car tracks were so new I was uncertain whether they were being put down or taken up.
I hailed a policeman.
“Are these tracks being removed or put in?”
“Put in,” he replied. “They’ve just finished a long fight here. The rich people didn’t want it, but the people won. Tom Johnson began fighting for this years ago.”
Tom Johnson! What an odd sense of the passing of all things the name gave me. Between 1895 and 1910 his name was on nearly everyone’s tongue. How he was hated by the growing rich! In the face of the upspringing horde of financial buccaneers of that time—Hanna, Rockefeller, Morgan, Harriman, Ryan—he stood out as a kind of tribune of the people. He had made money in business, and by much the same methods as every other man, taking and keeping, but now he declared himself desirous of seeing something done for the people—of doing something—and so he fought for three cent fares in Cleveland, to be extended, afterwards, everywhere, I suppose.
Don’t smile, dear reader. I know it sounds like a joke. In the face of the steady settling of all powers and privileges in America in the hands of a powerful oligarchy, the richest and most glittering the world has ever seen, the feeble dreamings of an idealist, and a but slightly equipped one at that, are foolish; but then, there is something poetic about it, just the same, quite as there is about all the other poets and dreamers the world has ever known. We always want to help the mass, we idealists, ’at first. We look about and see human beings like ourselves, struggling, complaining, dying, pinching along with little or nothing, and our first thought is that some one human being or some group of beings is responsible, that nature has designed all to have plenty, and that all we have to do is to clear away the greed of a few individuals who stand between man and nature, and presto, all is well again. I used to feel that way and do yet, at times. I should hate to think it was all over with America and its lovely morning dreams.
And it’s fine poetry, whether it will work or not. It fits in with the ideas of all prophets and reformers since the world began. Think of Henry George, that lovely soul, dying in New York in a cheap hotel, fighting the battle of a labor party—he, the dreamer of “Progress and Poverty.” And Doctor (The Reverend Father) McGlynn, declaring that some day we would have an American Pope strolling down Broadway under a silk hat and being thoroughly social and helpful and democratic; and then being excommunicated from the church for it or silenced—which was it? And W. J. Bryan, with his long hair and his perfect voice (that moving, bell-like voice), wishing to solve all the ills of man by sixteen to one—the double standard of gold and silver; and John P. Altgeld, high, clear, dreamy soul, with his blue eyes and his sympathy for the betrayed anarchists and the poor; and “Potato” Pingree, as they used to call him, once governor of Michigan, who wanted all idle land in Detroit and elsewhere turned over to the deserving poor in order that they might grow potatoes or something else on it. And Henry Ford with his “peace ship” and his minimum of five dollars a day for every man, and Hart, Schaffner and Marx with their minimum of two dollars for every little seamstress and poorest floor washer. What does it all mean?
I’ll tell you.
It means a sense of equilibrium, or the disturbance of it. Contrasts remain forever,—vast differences in brain, in heart, in opportunity, in everything; but now and then when the contrasts become too sharp or are too closely juxtaposed, up rises some tender spirit—Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or Christ, or St. Francis, or John Huss, or Savanarola, or Robert Owen, or John Brown, or Abraham Lincoln, or William Lloyd Garrison, or Walt Whitman, or Lloyd George, or Henry Ford, or John P. Altgeld, or W. J. Bryan—and begins to cry “Ho! Assyrian” or its equivalent. It is wonderful. It is positively beautiful and thrilling, this love of balance and “fair play” in nature. These men are not always thinking of themselves, you may depend on it. It is inherent in the scheme of things, just as are high mountains and deep valleys, but oh, those who have the sense of it—those dreamers and poets and seekers after the ideal!
“They can kill my body but not what I stand for.”—John Brown.