Two lads in a high school fought a duel over the attentions which one was paying to the other’s sister. The local newspapers gave it nearly as much space as they gave to the floods in Ohio. The little girls who looked on were all interviewed, and we were told what the sister said when she went to see her wounded lover in the hospital. Of course the perspective was absurd, but the performance was by no means absurd.
So with the divorce-suits that are tried in the court-rooms, which have no walls, where the busy reporters prepare themselves to tell us a hundred things that we have no right to know. A brutal husband forces his wife to sue him for divorce as her only defense against his cruelty, and the newspapers coöperate with him in exposing to the common gaze all the tender privacies of the woman’s soul.
We read such revelations, at first ashamed, as if we were looking through a keyhole, then somewhat brutalized ourselves by the experience. Thus the line is blurred between the publicity which is for the good of the people and for the terror of offenders, and the publicity which is only gossip and scandal printed for no other purpose than to sell the papers and make money. Whatever the remedy, the fact is plain that our sense of the honest rights of privacy is dulled. If Lady Godiva were to ride through the streets of Coventry to-day, there would be Peeping Toms in groups at every window with cameras and machines for taking moving pictures.
It is not improbable that one of the next important movements in this country will be for a greater sense of responsibility to wholesome public opinion on the part of the press. There is so much that is good and helpful and truly progressive in the better newspapers, and they are so sound on the larger questions of national policy, that it is to be hoped that the reformation of the grosser faults of journalism will be initiated by them. And in saying this we must not forget the offenses against good taste and good morals which are continually being perpetrated by certain periodicals that appear but once a month.
THE CHANGING VIEW OF GOVERNMENT
A GROWING SENSE OF ITS DUTIES TO THE PEOPLE
A MEMBER of Congress summed up the strongest impression from his latest electoral campaign as being that the people in this country are coming to have a much more vivid sense of the Government as “a political entity” which “owes duties.” He obviously means something more than Secretary Hay’s famous phrase about the “administrative entity” of China. This is no mere quibble about Pope’s “forms of government.” It implies a wide departure from the old view that government is a necessary evil, to be kept as limited as possible. However we explain or interpret the new conception, its existence and increasing sway over the minds of men will not be questioned by any one who keeps his eyes open to the facts. He may call the tendency socialistic or simply an extension of the democratic principle, but that it has now become a part of American political thinking he cannot well deny.
Equally undeniable is it that the idea that people have of the nature and function of their Government is more important than any mere question of governmental machinery. We hear much of a movement to “restore the government to the people.” All manner of political devices are commended, or else condemned, to bring about a more direct participation by the citizen in the work of government. Be these proposals wise or foolish, it is plain that the chief question lies behind them. It is what the people wish their Government to be; what they would now have done by those responsible for its conduct; what they themselves would undertake by means of governmental agencies in case those agencies were somehow made more quickly responsive to the popular will. Show a political philosopher what the driving forces of a republic really desire it to be or to become, and he will be able to get much more instruction out of that, much more material on which to base prophecies respecting future development, than he possibly can from endless talk about primaries and conventions, ballot-laws and corrupt-practices acts. Those are only means and machinery; the end aimed at is the main thing.
Looking back at the recent enlargement of governmental activities, and endeavoring to read in them the new sense of duties owed, we are able to detect at least a few general indications and even certain principles. For example, it is clear that the people are demanding, and will more and more demand, that their governments, local and national, do a great deal more than was formerly expected to conserve the physical health of the nation. Here is the origin of pure-food laws, of meat-inspection, of statutes against the adulteration of drugs. In this feeling of the vital relation that ought to exist between the Government and the bodily well-being of its subjects we have also the explanation of official campaigns against disease, of the movement for a national quarantine, and of the great broadening of the work everywhere laid upon health officers.
All this has not come about through a deliberate or reasoned change in the point of view. It is, rather, the result of quiet pressure from the practical side. Large problems of public health have pushed themselves to the front; and in seeking to solve them, the people have merely laid hold of the powers of government as ready and efficient instruments. It is now tacitly assumed that the Government is under a continuing obligation to guard the people against epidemic disease and exposure to impure food and deleterious drugs. This is now distinctly one of the duties owed.