One of the stock arguments which conservatism always brings out to give a final quietus to any proposal for social reform, is—“Oh, that's impossible; you'd have to change human nature!” This mental attitude, which, I am sorry to say, is the prevailing one with the great majority of mankind, is admirable satirized in some verses which I had great pleasure in printing in the April number of the St. Louis Public Library Magazine:
There was once a Neolithic Man, an enterprising wight,
Who made his simple instruments unusually bright,
Unusually clever he, unusually brave.
And he sketched delightful mammoths on the border of his cave,
To his Neolithic neighbors who were startled and surprised,
Said he: “My friends, in course of time we shall be civilized!
We are going to live in cities and build churches and make laws!
We are going to eat three times a day without the natural cause!
We're going to turn life upside down about a thing called Gold!
We're going to want the earth, and take as much as we can hold!
We are going to wear a pile of stuff outside our proper skins;
We're going to have Diseases! and Accomplishments!! and Sins!!!
Then they all rose up in fury against this boastful friend
For prehistoric patience comes quickly to an end.
Said one, “This is chimerical! Uptopian! Absurd!”
Said another, “What a stupid life! Too dull, upon my word!”
Cried all, “Before such things can come, you idiotic child,
You must alter Human Nature!” and they all sat back and smiled!
Thought they, “An answer to that last it will be hard to find!”
It was a clinching argument—to the Neolithic Mind!
Yes, great progress and reform can be accomplished without changing human nature. The elemental forces in the heart of man are the same now as in the earliest recorded ages, and they are likely to remain the same for all time to come. We cannot change the elements of man's nature; but by changing conditions we can improve the product of reaction. We can elevate conduct by elevating ideals. There was a time when the man who could wield the heaviest battle-axe was the greatest man; and there are still circles in which Corbett and Fitzsimmons are regarded as the greatest men of the present day. But the men who now excite most general admiration are our “captains of industry,” the men who succeed in getting money and the luxury and power it commands. How shall we elevate our national ideals?
Selfishness is a mainspring of human action. A like motive, desire for happiness, sets men to fighting dogs and to founding hospitals. Nero found pleasure in one way, Marcus Aurelius in another. Charles I. and Louis XVI. were not bad men; but they were controlled by outgrown standards. Elizabeth, Napoleon, Peter, and Catherine of Russia sought their own pleasure in accordance with their personal characters and the standards of their times. But how much higher and purer pleasure the devotion of their talents to the service of their fellowmen brought to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, Cobden, Bright and Gladstone—and John Pounds!
False standards, low ideals, now lead many good men to find their pleasure, not in cruelty, not in sensuality, but in the accumulation of wealth, partly for the luxury, chiefly for the power it brings. “Superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer.”
With the spread of intelligence and thought, and the consequent elevation of popular ideals, men possessed of millions will not seek to add to their large legitimate gains by legalized robbery from their fellow-citizens; and people calling themselves Christians will not rejoice in the distress and starvation of their fellow-men across the ocean. Men will still be selfish but their selfishness will at least be on a higher plane—less intense, less destructive of essential rights.
How shall we most speedily bring about this desired consummation? By what agency can we most effectively elevate our national ideals? By extending and improving our system of popular education, by reversing the usual order and beginning where school curricula now end, by placing our school-children from their earliest years in close and familiar contact with the life and thought of the race as expressed in literature, by exciting in every child admiration and emulation of the world's true heroes, by feeding the imagination and cultivating the moral faculties, by putting every child into the way of acquiring a social and a historic perspective.
I suppose I am one of those simple-minded visionary optimists of whom Prof. Royce speaks. But I do not “dislike” economic facts in the sense of ignoring them, and I am not blind to the persistence of the elemental forces of human nature. But as the abolition of slavery changed men's mental attitude towards this social crime, without at all changing human nature, just so I believe that the adoption of other social reforms would in a generation cause all men to look with horror and wonder upon social injustice that nearly every one now ignores or regards as irremediable and inevitable. I share Ruskin's scorn of the word “Utopian.” “A thing is either possible or impossible.” As Carlyle says, “The actual final rights of man lie in the far deeps of the ideal. Every noble work is at first impossible.” In the A.L.A. we have heard the word “Utopian,” or its equivalent, on more than one occasion met by the motto, “Hitch your wagon to a star”; and we have seen the impracticable an accomplished fact.
If time permitted I might risk ridicule by presenting some features of the vision that I see with the eye of faith in an all-wise and all-powerful Creater and belief in human perfectibility as an infinite progress.
“Die Zukunft decket
Schmerzen and Glücke
Schrittweis' dem Blicke;
Doch ungeschrecket,
Dringen wir vorwärts.”