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Title: Forty Years of It

Author: Brand Whitlock

Author of introduction, etc.: Albert Jay Nock

Release date: March 18, 2022 [eBook #67648]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: D. Appleton and Company

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FORTY YEARS OF IT ***





FORTY YEARS OF IT




BY RALPH HENRY BARBOUR.

  Benton’s Venture.
  Around the End.
  The Junior Trophy.
  Change Signals!
  For Yardley.
  Finkler’s Field.
  Winning His “Y.”
  The New Boy at Hilltop.
  Double Play.
  Forward Pass!
  The Spirit of the School.
  Four in Camp.
  Four Afoot.
  Four Afloat.
  The Arrival of Jimpson.
  Behind the Line.
  Captain of the Crew.
  For the Honor of the School.
  The Half-Back.
  On Your Mark.
  Weatherby’s Inning.

D. APPLETON & COMPANY, NEW YORK.




  FORTY
  YEARS OF IT

  BY
  BRAND WHITLOCK

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK AND LONDON
  D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
  MCMXIV




  COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
  D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

  Copyright, 1913, by THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY

  Printed in the United States of America




  TO THE MEMORY OF
  MY FATHER

  ELIAS D. WHITLOCK

  WHO DIED DECEMBER 23, 1913

  A MINISTER OF THE SANCTUARY, AND
  OF THE TRUE TABERNACLE, WHICH
  THE LORD PITCHED, AND NOT MAN




INTRODUCTION


The history of democracy’s progress in a mid-Western city--so, to
introduce this book in specific terms, one perhaps inevitably must
call it. Yet in using the word _democracy_, one must plead for a
distinction, or, better, a reversion, indicated by the curious
anchylosis that, at a certain point in their maturity, usually sets in
upon words newly put in use to express some august and large spiritual
reality. We all know how this materializing tendency, if one may
call it that, has affected our notion and our use of the commonest
religious terms like _faith_, _grace_, _salvation_, for instance.
Their connotation, originally fluid, spiritual and subjective, has
become concrete, limited, partial, ignoble. So, too, in our common
speech, even above the catchpenny vocabulary of the demagogue or
politician, the word _democracy_ has taken on the limited, partial and
ignoble connotation of more or less incidental and provisional forms
of democracy’s practical outcome; or even of by-products not directly
traceable to the action of democracy itself. How often, for example, do
we see direct primaries, the single tax, the initiative and referendum
posed in a kind of sacramental relation to “fundamental democracy”; or
the “essential movement of democracy” measured, say, by the increased
returns on the Socialist ticket at some local election!

The permanent value of this book is that it proceeds out of a truly
adequate and philosophical conception of democracy. That the collective
human spirit should know itself, καταμαθεῖν τὴν φύσιν καὶ ταύτη
ἕπεσθαι, that the state, the communal unit, should be, in Mr. Arnold’s
phrase, “the expression of our best self, which is not manifold and
vulgar and unstable and contentious and ever varying, but one and noble
and secure and peaceful and the same for all mankind”; here we have
in outline the operation of democracy. One could not give this volume
higher praise than to say, as in justice one must say, that it clearly
discerns and abundantly conveys the spirit which works in human nature
toward this end.

How important it is to maintain this fluid, philosophical and spiritual
view of democracy may be seen when we look about us and consider
the plight of those--especially the many now concerned in politics,
whether professionally or as eager amateurs--who for lack of it confuse
various aspects of the political problem of liberty with the social
problem of equality. With political liberty or with self-expression
of the individual in politics, democracy has, and ever has had, very
little to do. It is our turbid thought about democracy that prevents
our seeing this. The aristocratic and truculent barons did more for
the political freedom of Englishmen than was ever done by democracy;
a selfish and sensual king did more to gain the individual Englishman
his freedom of self-expression in politics. In our own country it is
matter of open and notorious fact that a political party whose every
sentiment and tendency is aristocratic has been the one to bring about
the largest measures of political enfranchisement. Now, surely, one
may heartily welcome every enlargement of political liberty, but if
one attributes them to a parentage which is not theirs, if one relates
them under _democracy_, the penalty which nature inexorably imposes
upon error is sure to follow. If, therefore, in the following pages
the author seems occasionally lukewarm toward certain enfranchising
measures, I do not understand that he disparages them, but only that
he sees--as their advocates, firmly set in the confusion we speak
of, cannot see--that their connection with democracy is extremely
indistinct and remote. _Equality_--a social problem, not to be worked
out by the mechanics of politics, but appealing wholly to the best
self, the best reason and spirit of man,--this is democracy’s concern,
democracy’s chief interest. It is to our author’s praise, again, that
he sees this clearly and expresses it convincingly.

By far the most admirable and impressive picture in this book appears
to me to be that which the author has all unconsciously drawn of
himself. It reveals once more that tragedy--the most profound, most
common and most neglected of all the multitude of useless tragedies
that our weak and wasteful civilization by sheer indifference
permits--the tragedy of a richly gifted nature denied the opportunity
of congenial self-expression. What by comparison is the tragedy of
starvation, since so very many willingly starve, if haply they may find
this opportunity? The author is an artist, a born artist. His natural
place is in a world unknown and undreamed of by us children of an age
commissioned to carry out the great idea of industrial and political
development. He belongs by birthright in the eternal realm of divine
impossibilities, of sublime and delightful inconsistencies. Greatly
might he have fulfilled his destiny in music, in poetry, in painting
had he been born at one of those periods when spiritual activity was
all but universal, when spiritual ideas were popular and dominant,
_volitantes per ora virum_, part of the very air one breathed--in the
Greece of Pericles, the England of Elizabeth, or on the Tuscan hills
at the time of the Florentine Renaissance! But this was not to be. An
admirer, jealous of every possible qualification, reminds me that I
should call him at least a philosophical artist; yes, but not by nature
even that. The toga did not drop upon him readymade from a celestial
loom. It was woven and fitted laboriously by his own hands. He sought
philosophical consistency and found it and established himself in it;
but only as part of the difficult general discipline of an alien life.

What an iron discipline, and how thoroughly alien a life, stands
revealed to the eye of poetic insight and the spirit of sympathetic
delicacy, on every page of these memoirs. For the over-refined (as
we say), the oversensitive soul of a born artist--think of the
experience, think of the achievement! The very opposite of all that
makes a politician, appraising politics always at their precise value,
yet patiently spending all the formative years of his life in the
debilitating air of politics for the sake of what he might indirectly
accomplish. Not an executive, yet incessantly occupied with tedious
details of administrative work, for the satisfaction of knowing them
well done. Not a philosopher, yet laboriously making himself what
Glanvil quaintly calls “one of those larger souls who have traveled the
divers climates of opinion” until he acquired a social philosophy that
should meet his own exacting demands.

Is it too much, then, that I invite the reader’s forbearance with
these paragraphs to show why our author should himself take rank and
estimation with the great men whom he reverently pictures? He tells
the story of Altgeld and of Johnson, energetic champions of the newer
political freedom. He tells the story of Jones, the incomparable true
democrat, one of the children of light and sons of the Resurrection,
such as appear but once in an era. And in the telling of these men
and of himself as the alien and, in his own view, largely accidental
continuator of their work, it seems to me that he indicates the process
by which he too has worked out his own position among them as “one
of those consoling and hope-inspiring marks which stand forever to
remind our weak and easily discouraged race how high human goodness and
perseverance have once been carried and may be carried again.”

                                                        ALBERT JAY NOCK.

  THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE,
    NEW YORK.




FORTY YEARS OF IT




FORTY YEARS OF IT




I


One hot afternoon in the summer of my tenth year, my grandfather,
having finished the nap he was accustomed to take after the heavy
dinner which, in those days, was served at noon in his house, told
me that I might go up town with him. This was not only a relief, but
a prospect of adventure. It was a relief to have him finish his nap,
because while he was taking his nap, my grandmother drew down at all
the windows the heavy green shades, which, brought home by the family
after a residence in Nuremberg, were decorated at the bottom with a
frieze depicting scenes along the Rhine, and a heavy and somnolent
silence was imposed on all the house. When my grandfather took his nap,
life seemed to pause, all activities were held in suspense.

And the prospect was as a pleasant adventure, because whenever my
grandfather let me go up town with him he always made me a present,
which was sure to be more valuable, more expensive, than those little
gifts at home, bestowed as rewards of various merits and sacrifices
related to that institution of the afternoon nap, and forthcoming if he
got through the nap satisfactorily, that is, without being awakened.
They consisted of mere money, the little five or ten cent notes of
green scrip; “shin-plasters” they were called, I believe, in those days.

When my grandfather had rearranged his toilet, combing his thick white
hair and then immediately running his fingers through it to rumple it
up and give him a savage aspect, we set forth.

He wore broad polished shoes, low, and fastened with buckles, and
against the black of his attire his stiffly starched, immaculate white
waistcoat was conspicuous. Only a few of its lower buttons of pearl
were fastened; above that it was open, and from one of the buttonholes,
the second from the top, his long gold watch-chain hung from its large
gold hook. The black cravat was not hidden by his white beard, which
he did not wear as long as many Ohio gentlemen of that day, and he was
crowned by a large Panama hat, yellowed by years of summer service, and
bisected by a ridge that began at the middle of the broad brim directly
in front, ran back, climbed and surmounted the large high crown, and
then, descending, ended its impressive career at the middle of the
broad brim behind.

I was walking on his left hand, near the fence, but as we entered the
shade of the elms and shrubbery of the Swedenborgian churchyard, I went
around to his other side, because a ghost dwelt in the Swedenborgian
churchyard. My cousin had pointed it out to me, and once I had seen it
distinctly.

The precaution was unnecessary, for I had long known my grandfather for
a brave man. He had been a soldier, and many persons in Urbana still
saluted him as major, though at that time he was mayor; going up town,
in fact, meant to go to the town hall before going anywhere else. In
the shade he removed his hat, and taking out a large silk handkerchief,
passed it several times over his red, perspiring face.

It was, as I have said, a hot afternoon, even for an August afternoon
in Ohio, and it was the hottest hour of the afternoon. Main Street,
when we turned into it presently, was deserted, and wore an unreal
appearance, like the street of the dead town that was painted on
the scene at the “opera-house.” Far to the south it stretched its
interminable length in white dust, until its trees came together in
that mysterious distance where the fairgrounds were, and to the north
its vista was closed by the bronze figure of the cavalryman standing
on his pedestal in the Square, his head bowed in sad meditation, one
gauntleted hand resting on his hip, the other on his saber-hilt. Out
over the thick dust of the street the heat quivered and vibrated, and
if you squinted in the sun at the cavalryman, he seemed to move, to
tremble, in the shimmer of that choking atmosphere.

The town hall stood in Market Square; for, in addition to _the_ Square,
where the bronze cavalryman stood on his pedestal, there was Market
Square, the day of civic centers not having dawned on Urbana in that
time, nor, doubtless, in this.

Market Square was not a square, however, but a parallelogram, and
on one side of it, fronting Main Street, was the town hall, a low
building of brick, representing in itself an amazing unity of municipal
functions--the germ of the group plan, no doubt, and, after all, in
its little way, a civic center indeed. For there, in an auditorium,
plays were staged before a populace innocent of the fact that it had
a municipal theater, and in another room the city council sat, with
representatives from Lighttown, and Gooseville, and Guinea, and the
other _faubourgs_ of our little municipality. Under that long low roof,
too, were the “calaboose” and the headquarters of the fire department.
Back of these the structure sloped away into a market-house of some
sort, with a public scales, and broad, low, overhanging eaves, in the
shade of which firemen, and the city marshal, and other officials, in
the dim retrospect, seem to have devoted their leisure to the game of
checkers.

On the opposite side of Market Square there was a line of brick
buildings, painted once, perhaps, and now of a faint pink or cerise
which certain of the higher and more artistic grades of calcimining
assume, and there seems to have been a series, almost interminable, of
small saloons--declining and fading away somewhere to the east, in the
dark purlieus of Guinea.

Here, along this line of saloons, if it was a line of saloons, or, if
it was not, along the side of the principal saloon which in those wet
days commanded that corner, there were always several carts, driven
by Irishmen from Lighttown, smoking short clay pipes, and two-wheeled
drays driven by negroes from Guinea or Gooseville. These negro drivers
were burly men with shining black skins and gleaming eyes and teeth,
whose merry laughter was almost belied by the ferocious, brutal whips
they carried--whips precisely like that _Simon Legree_ had wielded in
the play in the theater just across the Square, now, by a stroke of
poetic justice, in the hands of _Uncle Tom_ himself. But on this day
the firemen were not to be seen under the eaves of the market-house;
their checker-boards were quite abandoned. The mules between the
shafts of these two-wheeled drays hung their heads and their long ears
drooped under the heat, and their black masters were curled up on the
sidewalk against the wall of the saloon, asleep. The Irishmen were
nowhere to be seen, and Market Square was empty, deserted, and sprawled
there reflecting the light in a blinding way, while from the yellow,
dusty level of its cobbled surface rose, wave on wave, palpably, that
trembling, shimmering, vibrating heat. And yet, there was one waking,
living thing in sight. There, out in the middle of the Square he stood,
a dusty, drab figure, with an old felt hat on a head that must have
ached and throbbed in that implacable heat, with a mass of rags upon
him, his frayed trousers gathered at his ankles and bound about by
irons, and a ball and chain to bind him to that spot. He had a broom in
his hands, and was aimlessly making a little smudge of dust, doing his
part in the observance of an old, cruel, and hideous superstition.

I knew, of course, that he was a prisoner. Usually there were three or
four, sometimes half a dozen, such as he. They were the chain-gang,
and they were Bad--made so by Rum. I knew that they were brought
out of the calaboose, that damp, dark place under the roof of the
market-house, somewhere between the office of the mayor and the
headquarters of the fire department; and glimpses were to be caught now
and then of their faces pressed against those bars.

When, under the shade of the broad eaves, we were about to enter the
mayor’s office, my grandfather motioned to the prisoner out there in
the center of the Square, who with a new alacrity dropped his broom,
picked up his ball, and lugging it in his arms, came up close to us,
so very close that I could see the sweat that drenched his forehead,
stood in great beads on his upper lip, matted the hair on his forearms,
stained with dark splashes his old shirt, and glistened on his throat
and breast, burned red by the sun. He dropped his ball, took off that
rag of a hat, raised eyelids that were powdered with dust, and looked
at my grandfather.

“How many days did I give you?” my grandfather asked him.

“Fifteen, your honor,” he said.

“How long have you been in?”

“Three days, your honor.”

“Are you the only one in there?”

“Yes, your honor.”

My grandfather paused and looked at him.

“Pretty hot out there, isn’t it?” asked my grandfather.

The prisoner smiled, a smile exactly like that anyone would have for
such a question, but the smile flickered from his face, as he said:

“Yes, your honor.”

My grandfather looked out over the Square and up and down. There was no
one anywhere to be seen.

“Well, come on into the office.”

The prisoner picked up his ball, and followed my grandfather into the
mayor’s office. My grandfather went to a desk, drew out a drawer,
fumbled in it, found a key, and with this he stooped and unlocked the
irons on the prisoner’s ankles. But he did not remove the irons--he
seated himself in the large chair, and leaned comfortably against its
squeaking cane back.

“Now,” my grandfather said, “you go out there in the Square--be careful
not to knock the leg irons off as you go,--and you sweep around for a
little while, and when the coast is clear you kick them off and light
out.”

The creature in the drab rags looked at my grandfather a moment, opened
his lips, closed them, swallowed, and then....

“You’d better hurry,” said my grandfather, “I don’t know what minute
the marshal----”

The prisoner gathered up his ball, hugged it carefully, almost
tenderly, in his arms, and, with infinity delicacy as to the irons on
his feet, he shuffled carefully, yet somehow swiftly out. I saw him an
instant in the brilliant glittering sunlight framed by the door; he
looked back, and then he disappeared, leaving only the blank surface
of the cobblestones with the heat trembling over them.

My grandfather put on his glasses, turned to his desk, and took up some
papers there. And I waited, in the still, hot room. The minutes were
ticked off by the clock. I wondered at each loud tick if it was the
minute in which it would be proper for the prisoner to kick off those
irons from his ankles and start to run. And then, after a few minutes,
a man appeared in the doorway, and said breathlessly:

“Joe, he has escaped!”

It was Uncle John, a brother of my grandfather, one of the Brands of
Kentucky, then on a visit--one of those long visits by which he and my
grandfather sought to make up the large arrears of the differences, the
divisions, and the separations of the great war. He was nearly of my
grandfather’s age, and like him a large man, with a white though longer
beard. At his entrance my grandfather did not turn, nor speak, and
Uncle John Brand cried again:

“Joe, he’s gone, I tell you; he’s getting away!”

My grandfather looked up then from his papers and said:

“John, you’d better come in out of that heat and sit down. You’re
excited.”

“But he’s getting away, I tell you! Don’t you understand?”

“Who is getting away?”

“Why, that prisoner.”

“What prisoner?”

“The prisoner out there in the Square. He has escaped! He’s gone!”

“But how do you know?”

“I just saw him running down Main Street like a streak of lightning.”

My grandfather took out his silk handkerchief, passed it over his brow,
and said:

“To think of anyone running on a day like this!”

And Uncle John Brand stood there and gazed at his brother with an
expression of despair.

“Can’t you understand,” he said, speaking in an intense tone, as if
somehow to impress my grandfather with the importance of this event
in society, “can’t you understand that the prisoner out there in the
Square has broken away, has escaped, and at this minute is running down
Main Street, and that he’s getting farther and farther away with each
moment that you sit there?”

I had a vivid picture of the man running with long strides, in the soft
dust of Main Street; he must even then, I fancied, be far down the
street; he must indeed be down by Bailey’s, and perhaps Bailey’s dog
was rushing out at him, barking. And I hoped he would run faster, and
faster, and get away, though I felt it was wrong to hope this. Uncle
John Brand seemed to be right; though I did not like him as I liked my
grandfather.

“But how could he get away?” my grandfather was asking. “He was in
irons.”

“He got the irons off somehow,” Uncle John Brand said, exasperated; “I
don’t know how. He didn’t stop to explain!” He found a relief in this
fine sarcasm, and then said:

“Aren’t you going to do anything?”

“Well,” said my grandfather, with an irresolution quite uncommon in
him, “I suppose I really ought to do something. But I don’t know just
what to do.” He sat up, and looked about all over the room. “You don’t
see the marshal, do you?”

Uncle John Brand was looking at him now in disgust.

“Just look outside there, will you, John,” my grandfather went on, “and
see if you can find him? If you do, send him in, and I’ll speak to him
and have him go after the prisoner.”

Uncle John Brand of Kentucky stood a moment in the doorway, finding no
words with which to express himself, and then went out. And when he had
gone my grandfather leaned back in his chair and laughed and laughed;
laughed until his ruddy face became much redder than it was even from
the heat of that day.




II


Now that I have set down, with such particularity, an incident which I
could not wholly understand nor reconcile with the established order
of things until many years after, I am not so sure after all that I
witnessed it in that Urbana of reality; it may have been in that Urbana
of the memory, wherein related scenes and incidents have coalesced with
the witnessed event, or in that Macochee of certain of my attempts in
fiction, though I have always hoped that the fiction was the essential
reality of life, and have tried to make it so.

I am certain, however, that the incident as related is entirely
authentic, for I have recently made inquiries and established it
beyond a reasonable doubt, as the lawyers say, in all its details as
here given. I say in all its details, save possibly as to that of
my own corporeal presence on the scene, at the actual moment of the
occurrence. Only the other day I asked a favorite aunt of mine, and
she remembered the incident perfectly, and many another similar to it.
“It was just like him,” she added, with a dubious, though tolerant
fondness. But when, like the insistent, questioning child in one of
Riley’s Hoosier poems, I asked her if I had been there, she said she
could not remember.

But whether I was there in the flesh or not, or whether the whole
reality of that scene, so poignant, and insistent, and indelible,
with its denial of the grounds of authority, its challenge to the
bases of society, its shock to the orthodox mind (like that of John
Brand of Kentucky, a strict constructionist, who believed in the old
Constitution, and even then, in slavery), remains in my memory as the
result of one of those tricks of a mind that has always dramatized
scenes for its own amusement, I was there in spirit, and, indeed, at
many another scene in the life of Joseph Carter Brand, whose name
my mother gave me as a good heritage. Whatever the bald and banal
physical fact may have been, I was either present at the actual or in
imagination at the described scene to such purpose that from it I
derived an impression never to be erased from my mind.

It is not given to all of us to say with such particularity and
emphasis, just what we learned from each person who has touched our
existences and affected the trend of our lives, as it was given to
Marcus Aurelius, for instance, so that one may say that from Rusticus
one received this impression, or that from Apollonius one learned this
and from Alexander the Platonic that; we must rather ascribe our little
store of knowledge generally to the gods. But I am sure that no one was
ever long with Joseph Carter Brand, or came to know him well, without
learning that rarest and most beautiful of all the graces or of all the
virtues--Pity.

  He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble
  Here, and in hell.

Perhaps it is not so much pity as sympathy that I mean, but whether it
was pity or sympathy, it was that divine quality in man which enables
him to imagine the sorrows of others, to understand what they feel, to
suffer with them; in a word, the ability to put himself in the other
fellow’s place--the hallmark, I believe, of true culture, far more than
any degree or doctor’s hood could possibly be.

It may have been some such feeling as this for the negroes that led
him, when a young man in Kentucky, to renounce a patrimony of slaves
and come north. It was not, to be sure, a very large patrimony, for
his father was a farmer in a rather small way in Bourbon County, and
owned a few slaves, but whatever the motive, he refused to own human
chattels and left Bourbon County, where his branch of the Brands had
lived since their emigration from Virginia, to which colony, so long
before, their original had come as a Jacobite exile from Forfarshire in
Scotland.

My grandfather came north into Ohio and Champaign County, and he had
not been there very long before he went back to Virginia and married
Lavina Talbott, and when they went to live on the farm he called
“Pretty Prairie,” he soon found himself deep in Ohio politics, as it
seems the fate of most Ohioans to be, and continued in that element
all his life. He had his political principles from Henry Clay,--he had
been to Ashland and had known the family,--and he was elected as a Whig
to the legislature in 1842 and to the State Senate of Ohio in 1854.
There he learned to know and to admire Salmon P. Chase, then governor
of Ohio, and it was not long until he was in the Abolitionist movement,
and he got into it so deeply that nothing less than the Civil War could
ever have got him out, for he was in open defiance, most of the time,
to the Fugitive Slave Law.

One of the accomplishments in which he took pride, perhaps next to
his ability as a horseman, was his skill with the rifle, acquired in
Kentucky at the expense of squirrels in the tops of tall trees (he
could snuff a candle with a rifle), and this ability he placed at the
service of a negro named Ad White, who had run away from his master
in the South, and was hidden in a corn-crib near Urbana when overtaken
by United States marshals from Cincinnati. The negro was armed, and
was defending himself, when my grandfather and his friend Ichabod
Corwin, of a name tolerably well known in Ohio history, went to his
assistance, and drove the marshals off by the hot fire of their rifles.
The marshals retreated, and came up later with reinforcements, strong
enough to overpower Judge Corwin and my grandfather, but the negro had
escaped.

The scrape was an expensive one; there were proceedings against them
in the United States court in Cincinnati, and they only got out of it
years after when the Fugitive Slave Law was rapidly becoming no law,
and Ad White could live near Urbana in peace during a long life, and be
pointed out as an interesting relic of the great conflict.

This adventure befell my grandfather in 1858, when he had been
a Republican for two years, having been a delegate to the first
convention of the party in 1856, the one that met in Pittsburgh, before
the nominating convention which named Frémont had met in Philadelphia.
He had attended that convention with Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky, and
shared quarters with him at the hotel.

In 1908, in the Coliseum at Chicago, when the Republican National
Convention was in session, there were conducted to the stage one
morning, and introduced to the delegates, two old gentlemen who had
been delegates to that first convention of the party, and after they
had been presented and duly celebrated by the chairman and cheered
by the delegates they were assiduously given seats in large chairs,
and there, throughout the session, side by side they sat, their hands
clasped over the crooks of their heavy canes, their white old heads
unsteady, peering out in a certain purblind, bewildered, aged way over
that mighty assembly of the power and the wealth, the respectability
and the authority, of the nation--far other than that revolutionary
gathering they had attended half a century before!

All through the session, now and then, I would look at them; there was
a certain indefinable pathos in them, they sat so still, they were
so old, there was in their attitude the acquiescence of age--and I
would recall my grandfather’s stories of the days when they were the
force in the Republic, and the runaway “niggers,” and the rifles, and
the great blazing up of liberty in the land, and it seemed to me that
Time, or what Thomas Hardy calls the Ironic Spirit, or perhaps it was
only the politicians who were managing the convention, had played some
grotesque, stupendous joke on those patriarchs. Did their old eyes,
gazing so strangely on that scene, behold its implications? Did they
descry the guide-post that told them how far away they really were from
that first convention and its ideals?

But whatever the reflections of those two aboriginal Republicans, or
whatever emotions or speculations they may have inspired in those who
saw them,--the torch of liberty being ever brandished somewhere in
this world and tossed from hand to hand,--they had done their part in
their day, and might presumably be allowed to look on at the antics
of men wherever they chose, in peace. They had known Lincoln, no
inconsiderable distinction in itself!

Out of that first convention my grandfather, like them, had gone, and
he had done his part to help elect Lincoln after Lincoln had defeated
Chase in the Chicago convention of 1860, and had been nominated for the
presidency. And then, with his man elected, my grandfather had gone
into the war that broke upon the land.

He went in with the 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a regiment which he
was commissioned by Governor Dennison to recruit at Urbana, and when
it was marshaled in camp near Urbana its command was offered him,
an honor and a responsibility he declined because, he said, he knew
nothing of the art of war, if it is an art, or of its science, if it is
a science, and so was content with the shoulder-straps of a captain.
One of his sons, a lieutenant in the regular army, was already at the
front with his regiment, and another son was a captain in the 66th, and
later on, when my grandfather had been transferred to the Department
of Subsistence, he took his youngest son with him in the capacity of
a clerk, so that the men of his family were away to the war for those
four years, and the women remained behind, making housewives and
scraping lint, and watching, and waiting, and praying, and enduring all
those hardships and making all those sacrifices which are so lauded by
the poetic and the sentimental and yet are not enough to entitle them
to a voice in that government in whose cause they are made.

The situation was made all the more poignant because the great issue
had separated the family, and there were brothers and cousins on the
other side, though one of these, in the person of Aunt Lucretia,
chose that inauspicious time to come over from the other side all the
way from Virginia, to pay a visit, and celebrated the report of a
Confederate victory by parading up town with a butternut badge on her
bosom. She sailed several times about the Square, with her head held
high and her crinolines rustling and standing out, and her butternut
badge in evidence, and was rescued by my grandmother, who, hearing
of her temerity, went up town in desperation and in fear that she
might arrive too late. It was a story I was fond of hearing, and as I
pictured the lively scene I always had the statue of the cavalryman as
a figure in the picture--though of course the statue could not have
been in existence during the war, since it was erected as a memorial
to the 66th and a monument to its fallen heroes and their deeds. The
cavalryman, an officer wearing a romantic cloak and the old plumed hat
of the military fashion of that date, and leaning on his saber in a
gloomy way, I always thought was a figure of my uncle, that Captain
Brand who went out with the 66th, just as I thought for a long time
that the Civil War was practically fought out on the northern side
by the 66th, which was not so strange perhaps, since nearly every
family in Urbana had been represented in the regiment, and they all
talked of little else than the war for many years. They called the
66th the “Bloody Sixty-sixth,” a name I have since heard applied to
other regiments, but the honorable epithet was not undeserved by that
legion, for it had a long and most gallant record, beginning with the
Army of the Potomac and fighting in all that army’s battles until after
Gettysburg, and then with the 11th and 12th corps it was transferred,
under Hooker, to the Army of the Tennessee, at Chattanooga, in time for
Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, after which it went with Sherman
to the sea, and thus completed the circuit of the Confederacy.




III


My grandfather, however, did not go with his regiment to the West. He
had been transferred to the Commissary Department, and he remained with
the Army of the Potomac until the close of the war, and it was on some
detail connected with his duties in that department that, in 1865, he
went into Washington and had the interview with President Lincoln I
so much liked to hear him tell about. It was not in the course of his
military duty that he went to see the Commander-in-Chief; whatever
those duties were they were quickly discharged at the War Department,
so that, in the hours of freedom remaining to him before he went back
to the front, he did what everyone likes to do in Washington,--he
went to see the President. But he went in no military capacity; he
went rather in that political capacity he so much preferred to the
military, and he went as to the chief he had so long known and loved
and followed.

It would be his old friend Chase who presented him to the President,
but their conversation was soon interrupted by the entrance of an aide
who announced the arrival in the White House grounds of an Indiana
regiment passing through Washington, which, as seems to have been the
case with most regiments passing through the Capital, demanded a speech
from the President. And Lincoln complied, and as he arose to go out he
asked my grandfather to accompany him, and they continued their talk
on the way. But when they stood in the White House portico, and the
regiment beheld the President and saluted him with its lifted cheer,
the aide stepped to my grandfather’s side, and much to his chagrin--for
he had been held by the President while he finished a story--told him
that it would be necessary for him to drop a few paces to the rear.
It was a little _contretemps_ that embarrassed my grandfather, but
Lincoln, with his fine and delicate perceptions, divined the whole
situation, and met it with that kindness which was so great a part of
the humor and humanness in him, by saying:

“You see, Mr. Brand, they might not know which was the President.”

It was not long after that he was at Appomattox and the first to issue
rations to the hungry Confederates who had just surrendered, and no
act of his life gave him quite as much satisfaction as to have been
the first to pour his whole supply of hardtack into the blankets of
those whom still and always he remembered as of his own blood. And that
done, after they had ridden into Richmond, he was relieved and was
soon back in Washington calling on Chase again. Chase asked him what
he could do for him, and my grandfather said there was but one thing
in the world he wanted: namely, to go home; and a request so simple
was granted with that alacrity with which politicians grant requests
that, in their scope, fall so short of what might have been expected.
But it was not long until Chase’s influence was requested in a more
substantial matter, and in 1870 my grandfather, with his wife and two
younger daughters, was on his way across the Atlantic to Nuremberg,
where President Grant had appointed him consul.

It was not, of course, until after his return from the foreign
experience that my conscious acquaintance with him began. But when they
returned and opened the old house, and filled it with the spoil of
their European travel,--some wonderful mahogany furniture and Dresden
china, and other objects of far more delight to us children,--he and
I began a friendship which lasted until his death, and was marred by
no misunderstanding, except, perhaps, as to the number of hours his
saddle-horse should be ridden on the gallop, and the German he wished
me to read to him out of the little black-bound volumes of Schiller and
Goethe, which for years were his companions. He held, no doubt with
some show of reason on his side, that if he could master the language
after he was sixty, I might learn at least to read it before I was
sixteen. The task had its discouragements, not lightened, even in
after years, when I read in their famous and delightful correspondence
Carlyle’s advice to Emerson to possess himself of the German language;
it could be done, wrote Carlyle, in six weeks! But, like Emerson, I was
afflicted with the postponement and debility of the blond constitution,
and I observed that, except in great moments of unappreciated
sacrifice, my grandfather preferred to read his German himself rather
than to listen to my renditions.

I have spoken of the house as the old house, and I do that as viewing
it from the point of disadvantage of the years that have gone since it
grew out of that haze and mist and darkness of early recollections into
a place that was ablaze with light at evening and full of the constant
wonder and delight of the company of a large family. It was, indeed,
an old house then, with a high-gabled roof at one wing, that made an
attic which we called, with a sense of its mystery, the “dark room,”--a
room, however, not so dark that I could not see to read the old bound
volumes of a newspaper an uncle had once edited;--one could lie under
the little gable windows and pore over the immense quartos, or more
than quartos, and exercise the imagination by reading of some long dead
event, and, with a great effort, project one’s self back to that time,
and pretend to read with none other than its contemporary impressions.

The cellar of the house was not so interesting, though it was
mysterious, and far more terrifying. There was a vast fireplace in the
cellar, in which, as Jane, the old colored woman who was sometimes a
cook and sometimes a nurse, once solemnly told my cousin and me, the
devil dwelt, so that I visited it only once, and there so plainly saw
the ugly horns of that dark deity that we fled upstairs and into the
sunlight again. It may have been that the crane and the andirons of
the old fireplace helped out the impression, though after the original
suggestion little was required to strengthen it, and we never went down
there again, except to lure a younger cousin as far as the door to
shudder in the awful pleasure of witnessing her fear.

This gabled wing had been the original house, and additions had been
built to it in two directions, with a wide hall, somewhat after the
southern fashion in which so many houses in that part of Ohio were
built in those days.

It seems larger in the retrospect than it is in the reality, and I am
not endowing it with the spaciousness of a mansion; it was, in fact, a
modest dwelling of a dozen rooms, with an atmosphere that was imparted
to it by the furniture that had been brought back from Europe, and the
personality that filled it.

My grandfather conducted his establishment on a scale of prodigality
that had a certain patriarchal air; he had a large family, and he loved
to have them all about him, and in the evenings they gathered there
at the piano they had bought in Berlin, and when the candles in their
curious brass sconces had been lighted, there was music, for the whole
family possessed some of that talent which, as President Eliot rightly
declares in his lecture on “The Happy Life,” contributes so much real
pleasure. My grandfather did not himself sing; or, at least, he sang
rarely, and then only one or two Scotch songs, but when he could be
induced to do this, the event took on the festal air of a celebration.

His two younger daughters had been educated in music in Germany, and
there was something more of music in the house than the mere classic
portraits of Mozart and Beethoven which hung on the wall near the
painting of the old castle at Nuremberg. They played duets, and once,
at least, at a recital given in the town, we achieved the distinction
of a number played on two pianos by my mother and her three sisters.

The May festivals in “the City,” as we called Cincinnati in those days,
were a part of existence, and my first excursion into the larger world
was when my father took me to Cincinnati to hear Theodore Thomas’s
Orchestra, which proved to be an excursion not only into a larger
world, but eventually into a larger life,--that life of music, that
life of a love of all the arts, which provides a consolation that would
be complete could I but express myself in any one of them. I did,
indeed, attempt some expression of the joys of that experience, for
with more pretension than I could dare to-day, I wrote a composition,
or paper, on Music which was printed in a child’s publication, and won
for me a little prize. It was twenty-two years before I was able again
to have any writing of mine accepted and published by a magazine.




IV


Urbana in those days was not without its atmosphere of culture,
influenced in a degree by the presence of the Urbana University, a
Swedenborgian college which in the days before the war had flourished,
because so many of its students came from the southern states. It
declined after the war, but even after that event, the presence of so
many persons of the Swedenborgian persuasion, with their gentle manners
and intellectual appreciation, kept the traditions alive, and the
college itself continued, though not so flourishingly, on its endowed
foundation.

One of the tutors in it was a young, brown-haired man who several
times a day passed by my grandfather’s home on his way to and from his
classes, whom afterwards I came to admire for those writings to which
was signed the name of Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen. He did not remain long
in Urbana, not longer it seems than he could help, and to judge from
some of his pictures of various phases of its life, he did not like the
town as well as the Urbana folk themselves liked it. It was a rather
self-sufficient town, I fancy, and it cared so little for change that
it has scarcely changed at all, save as one misses the faces and the
forms one used to see there in other days. It was the home of the
distinguished family, and the birthplace, too, of John Quincy Adams
Ward, the sculptor, and the possession of a personality in itself
distinguishes a town.

I was walking with my father across Market Square not long ago; it
had shrunk in size and seemed little and mean and sordid, despite the
new city hall that has replaced the old, and there was no miserable
prisoner idly sweeping the cobblestones, though the negro drivers with
their bull whips were snoozing there as formerly.

“They have been there ever since eighteen sixty-six,” said my father,
who had gone there in the year he had mentioned on his coming out of
college.

His home was in Piqua, a town not far away, where his father had
retired to rest after his lifelong labors on a farm he had himself
“cleared” in Montgomery County many years before. This paternal
grandfather was a large, gaunt, silent man, who spoke little, and then
mostly in a sardonic humor, as when, during that awful pioneer work of
felling a forest to make a little plantation, he said to his grown sons
who were helping to clear away the underbrush of a walnut wood:

“Boys, what little you cut, pile here.”

Few other of his sayings have been preserved, and it may be that he
has left behind an impression that he never talked at all because
he never talked politics, and not to do that in Ohio dooms one to
a silence almost perpetual. He had once been a Democrat, and had
participated with such enthusiasm in the campaign of 1856 that he had
kept his horses’ tails and manes braided for a month that they might
roll forth in noble curls when they were loosened, and the horses
harnessed to a carriage containing four veterans of the Revolution,
who were to be thus splendidly drawn to the raising of a tall hickory
pole in honor of James Buchanan, that year a candidate for president.
But the old diplomatist made such a miserable weakling failure of his
administration that his Piqua partizan became disgusted and renounced
forever his interest in political affairs, and, like Henry I., never
smiled again.

But my Grandfather Brand, when he was not talking about poetry or
the war, was talking about politics; sometimes world politics, for
he was interested in that; sometimes European politics, which he had
followed ever since in Paris he had witnessed the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War, or national politics, or state politics, or, in
default of a larger interest, local politics, which in Ohio, as no
doubt elsewhere, sometimes looms largest and most important of all,
because, perhaps, as De Tocqueville says, local assemblies constitute
the strength of free institutions.

My grandfather was then, at the time of which I am thinking even if
I am not very specifically writing about it, mayor--and continued
to be mayor for four terms. It was an office that was suited, no
doubt, to the leisure of his retirement, and while it gave him the
feeling of being occupied in public affairs, it nevertheless left him
opportunities enough for his German poets, and for his horses and his
farm out at Cable, and the strawberries he was beginning to cultivate
with the enthusiasm of an amateur.

In such an atmosphere as that in the Ohio of those days it was natural
to be a Republican; it was more than that, it was inevitable that one
should be a Republican; it was not a matter of intellectual choice, it
was a process of biological selection. The Republican party was not
a faction, not a group, not a wing, it was an institution like those
Emerson speaks of in his essay on Politics, rooted like oak-trees in
the center around which men group themselves as best they can. It was
a fundamental and self-evident thing, like life, and liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, or like the flag, or the federal judiciary. It
was elemental, like gravity, the sun, the stars, the ocean. It was
merely a synonym for patriotism, another name for the nation. One
became, in Urbana and in Ohio for many years, a Republican just as the
Eskimo dons fur clothes. It was inconceivable that any self-respecting
person should be a Democrat. There were, perhaps, Democrats in
Lighttown; but then there were rebels in Alabama, and in the Ku-klux
Klan, about which we read in the evening, in the Cincinnati _Gazette_.

One of the perplexing and confounding anomalies of existence was the
fact that our neighbor, Mr. L----, was a Democrat. That fact perhaps
explained to me why he walked so modestly, so unobtrusively, in the
shade, so close to the picket fences of Reynolds Street, with his head
bowed. I supposed that, being a Democrat, it was only natural for him
to slink along. He was a lawyer and a gentleman; my grandfather spoke
with him, but from my mind I could never banish the fact that he was
a Democrat, and to explain his bent, thoughtful attitude I imagined
another reason than the fact that he was a meditative, studious man.

Lawyers, of course, were Republicans, else how could they deliver
patriotic addresses on Decoration Day and at the reunions of the 66th
regiment? It was natural for a young man to be a lawyer, then to be
elected prosecuting attorney, then to go to the legislature, then
to congress, then--governor, senator, president. They could not, of
course, go any more to war and fight for liberty; that distinction was
no longer, unhappily, possible, but they could be Republicans. The
Republican party had saved the Union, won liberty for all men, and
there was nothing left for the patriotic to do but to extol that party,
and to see to it that its members held office under the government.

In those days the party had many leaders in Ohio who had served the
nation in military or civil capacity during the great crisis; scarcely
a county that had not some colonel or general whose personality
impressed the popular imagination; they were looked up to, and revered,
and in the political campaigns their faces, pale or red in the flare
of the torches of those vast and tumultuous processions that still
staged the political contest in the terms of war, looked down from the
festooned platforms in every public square. And yet they were already
remote, statuesque, oracular, and there was the reverent sense that
somehow placed them in the ideal past, whose problems had all been
happily solved, rather than in the real present.




V


But up in the northwestern part of the state, still referred to, even
in days so late as those, with something of the humorous contempt that
attached to the term, as the Black Swamp, there had risen a young,
fiery, and romantic figure who ignored the past and flung himself with
fierce ardor into a new campaign for liberty. His words fell strangely
on ears that were accustomed to the reassurance that liberty was at
last conquered, and his doctrines perplexed and irritated minds that
had sunk into the shallow optimism of a belief that there were no more
liberations needed in the world. It was not a new cry, indeed, that he
raised, but an old one thought to have been stilled, and the standard
he lifted in the Black Swamp was looked upon by many Ohioans as much
askance as though it were another secession flag of stars and bars.
Indeed, it had long been associated with the cause of the conquered
South, because that section, by reason of its economic conditions, had
long espoused the principle of Free Trade.

This young man was Frank Hunt Hurd, then the congressman from the
Toledo district, and in that city, where my father was the pastor of a
church, he had won many followers and adherents, though not enough to
keep him continually in his seat in the House of Representatives.

He served for several alternate terms, the interims being filled by
some orthodox nonentity, who was so speedily forgotten that there must
have been an impression that for years our district was represented by
this one man.

I had heard of him with that dim sense of his position which a boy has
of any public character, but I had a real vivid conception of him after
that Fourth of July when, during a citizens’ celebration which must
have been so far patriotic as to forget, for a time, partizanism, and
to remember patriotism sufficiently to include the Democrats, I saw him
conducted to the platform by our distinguished citizen, David R. Locke,
whom the world knew as “Petroleum V. Nasby.”

He delivered a patriotic oration, and anyone,--even though he were
but a wondering boy quite by chance in attendance, standing on the
outskirts of the crowd, following some whim which for a while kept him
from his sports,--anyone who ever heard Frank Hurd deliver an oration
never forgot it afterward.

I have no idea now what it was he said, perhaps I had as little then,
but his black hair, his handsome face, his beautiful voice, and the
majestic music of his rolling phrases were wholly and completely
charming. He was explicitly an orator, a student of the great art,
and he formed his orations on the ancient Greek models, writing them
out with exordium, proposition, and peroration, and while he did not
perhaps exactly commit them to memory, he, nevertheless, in the process
of preparing them, so completely possessed himself of them that he
poured forth his polished sentences without a flaw.

His speech on Free Trade, delivered in the House of Representatives,
February 18, 1881, remains the classic on that subject, ranking with
Henry Clay’s speech on “The American System,” delivered in the Senate
in 1832. In that address Frank Hurd began with the phrase, “The tariff
is a tax,” which acquired much currency years after when Grover
Cleveland used it.

Everyone, or nearly everyone, told me of course that Frank Hurd was
wrong, if he was not, indeed, wicked, and the subject possessed a kind
of fascination for me. In thinking of it, or in trying to think of
it, I only perplexed myself more deeply, until at last I reached the
formidable, the momentous decision of taking my perplexities to Frank
Hurd himself, and of laying them before him.

I was by this time a youth of eighteen, and in the summer when he had
come home from Washington I somehow found courage enough to go to the
hotel where he lived, and to inquire for him. He was there in the
lobby, standing by the cigar-stand, talking to some men, and I hung on
the outskirts of the little group until it broke up, and then the fear
I had felt vanished when he turned and smiled upon me. I told him that
I wished to know about Free Trade, and since there was nothing he liked
better to talk about, and too, since there were few who could talk
better about anything than he could talk about the tariff, we sat in
the big leather chairs while he discoursed simply on the subject. It
was the first at several of these conversations, or lessons, which we
had in the big leather chairs in the lobby of the old Boody House, and
it was not long until I was able, with a solemn pride, to announce at
home that I was a Free-Trader and a Democrat.

It could hardly have been worse had I announced that I had been
visiting Ingersoll, and was an atheist. Cleveland was president, and in
time he sent his famous tariff reform message to Congress, and though I
could not vote, I was preparing to give him my moral support, to wear
his badge, and even, if I could do no more, to refuse to march in the
Republican processions with the club of young men and boys organized in
our neighborhood.

For the first time in my life I went on my vacation trip to Urbana
that summer with reluctance, for the first time in my life I shrank
from seeing my grandfather. The wide front door opened, and from the
heat without to the dark and cool interior of the hall I stepped; I
prolonged the preliminaries, I went through the familiar apartments,
and out into the garden to see how it grew that summer, and down to
the stable to see the horses; but the inevitable hour drew on, and at
last, with all the trivial things said, all the personal questions
asked, we sat in the living-room, cool in the half-light produced
by its drawn shades, the soft air of summer blowing through it, the
odd old Nuremberg furniture, the painting of the Nuremberg castle
presented to my grandfather by the American artist whom he had rescued
from a scrape, the tall pier glass, with the little vase of flowers
on its marble base, and my grandfather in his large chair, his white
waistcoat half unbuttoned and one side sagging with the weight of
the heavy watch-chain that descended from its large hook, his white
beard trimmed a little more closely, his white hair bristling as
aggressively as ever--all the same, all as of old, like the reminders
of the old life and all its traditions now to be broken and rendered
forever and tragically different from all it had been and meant. He
sat there looking at me, the blue eyes twinkling under their shaggy
brows, and stretched forth his long white hand in the odd gesture with
which he began his conversations. Conversations with him, it suddenly
developed, were not easy to sustain; he pursued the Socratic method. If
you disagreed with him, he lifted three fingers toward you, whether in
menace or in benediction it was difficult at times to determine, and
said:

“Let me instruct you.”

For instance:

“Do you know why Napoleon III. lost the battle of Sedan?” he might
abruptly inquire.

“No, sir,” you were expected to say. (You always addressed him as
“sir.”)

“Let me instruct you.”

Or:

“Do you know who was the greatest English poet?”

“No, sir,” you would say, or, perhaps, in those days you might
venture, “Was it Shakespeare, sir?”

Then he would look at you and say:

“Let me instruct you.”

This afternoon then, after I had inspected the premises, noticed how
much taller my cousin’s fir-tree was than the one I called mine (we
had planted them one day, as little boys, years before), and after I
had had a drink at the old pump, which in those days, before germs,
brought up such cold, clear water, and after I had ascended to my cool
room upstairs, and come downstairs again, and we had idly talked for
a little while, as I said, he sat and looked at me a moment, and then
said:

“Do you understand this tariff question?”

In those days I might have made the due, what I might term with
reference to that situation, the conventional reply, and so have said:

“No, sir.”

In these days I am sure I should. But I hesitated. He had already
stretched forth his hand.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He drew in his hand, and for an instant touched with his long fingers
the end of his large nose. I plunged ahead.

“I am in favor of Free Trade, sir.”

He did not extend his hand. He looked at me a moment, and then he said:

“You are quite right; we must support Mr. Cleveland in the coming
contest.”

And then he sank back in his chair and laughed.

He was always like that, following the truth as he saw it, wherever
it led him. But his active days were not many after that; ere long he
was kicked by one of his horses, a vicious animal, half bronco, which
he insisted on riding, and he was invalided for the rest of his days.
He spent them in a wheel-chair, pushed about by a negro boy. It was a
cross he bore bravely enough, without complaint, spending his hours
in reading of politics, now that he could no longer participate in
them, and more and more in reading verse, and even in committing it
to memory, so that to the surprise of his family he soon replaced the
grace he had always said at table with some recited stanza of poetry,
and he took to cultivating, or to sitting in his chair while there was
cultivated, under his direction, a little rose garden. He knew all
those roses as though they were living persons: when a lady called,--if
the roses were in bloom,--he would say to his colored house-boy:

“Go cut off Madame Maintenon, and bring her here.”

Then he would present Madame Maintenon to the caller with such a bow
as he could make in his chair, and an apology for not rising. He was
patient and brave, yet he did not like to feel the scepter passing
from him, and he resented what he considered interferences with his
liberties. One day when he had returned from a visit to an old friend,
to whose home his colored boy had wheeled him, one of his daughters
asked, in a somewhat exaggerated tone of propitiation:

“Well, Father, how did you find Mr. Hovey?”

“I found him master of his own house!” he blazed.

In 1896 he supported Mr. Bryan, and his Republican neighbors said:

“Poor old Major Brand! His mind must be affected!”

It was an effort for him to get out to the polls, but he went,
beholding in that conflict, as he could in any conflict however
confused and clouded, the issue of free men above any other issue. He
did not get out much after that, even when that last summer the few
remnants of the 66th regiment gathered in Urbana to hold the annual
reunion. He could not so much as get up town to greet his old comrades,
and they sent word that in the afternoon they would march in review
before his home. He was wheeled out on the veranda, and there he sat
while his old regiment, the fifty or sixty gray, broken men, marched
past. They saluted as they went by, and he returned the salutes with
tears streaming down the cheeks where I had never seen tears before.
And he said with a little choking laugh:

“Why, look at the boys!”

It was not long after, that six of us, his grandsons, bore him out
of the old home forever. And on his coffin were the two things that
expressed him best, I think--his roses and his flag.




VI


The incalculable influence of the spoken word and the consequent
responsibility that weighs upon the lightest phrase have so long
been urged that men might well go about with their fingers on their
lips, oracular as presidential candidates, deliberating each thought
before giving it wing. And yet, as Carlyle said of French speech, the
immeasurable tide flows on and ebbs only toward the small hours of
the morning. Though even then in certain quarters, the tide does not
ebb, and in those hours truths are sometimes spoken--for instance, by
newspaper reporters, who, their night’s work done, turn to each other
for relaxation and speak those thoughts they have not dared to write in
their chronicles of the day that is done. The thought itself is only
a vagrant, encountered along the way back to such an evening, when
a reporter uttered two little words that acquired for me a profound
significance.

“Oh, nothing.” Those were the exact words, just those two, and yet a
negative so simple contained within itself such an affirmation of an
awful truth, that I have never been able to forget them, though for a
time I tried. Charlie R---- and I had gone one night, after the paper
had gone to press, into a little restaurant in Chicago to get some
supper. It was sometime in the year 1891, and, in our idle gossip, the
hanging of the anarchists, then an event so recent that the reporters
now and then spoke of it, had come up in our talk.

“Where were you when that occurred?” he asked.

“In Toledo,” I answered.

“What did people think of it there?”

“Of the hanging?”

“Yes.”

I looked at him, I suppose, in some astonishment. What did people
in Toledo think of the hanging of the Chicago anarchists! Could any
question have been more stupid, more banal? What did any people,
anywhere, think of it? What was customary, what was proper and
appropriate and indispensable under such circumstances? In a word, what
was there to do with anarchists except to hang them? Really, I was
quite at a loss what to say. It seemed so superfluous, so ridiculous,
as though he had asked what the people in Toledo thought of the world’s
being round, or of the force of gravity. More than superfluous, it was
callous; he might as well have asked what Toledo people thought of the
hanging of Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, or of the suicide
of Judas Iscariot. And I answered promptly in their defense:

“Why, they thought it was right, of course.”

He had his elbows on the table and was lighting a cigarette, and as
he raised the match, his dark face, with its closely trimmed pointed
beard, was suddenly and vividly illuminated by the yellow flame. His
eyes were lowered, their vision fixed just then on the interesting
process of igniting the end of the cigarette. But about his puckered
lips, about his narrowed eyes there played a little smile, faint,
elusive, and yet of a meaning so indubitable that it was altogether
disconcerting. And in that instant I wondered--it could not be! It was
preposterous, absurd!

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing,” he said.

The end of the cigarette was glowing, little coils of fire in the tiny
particles of tobacco; he blew out the match and the smile disappeared
from his face with its ruddy illumination, and he tossed the charred
stick into his coffee cup.

Were there, then, two opinions? Was it possible that anyone doubted?
When _anarchists_ were in question! Still, on that kindly face
before me there lingered the shadow of that strange expression,
inscrutable, perplexing, piquing curiosity. And yet by some strange,
almost clairvoyant process, it had gradually acquired the effect of a
persistent, irresistible and implacable authority, in the presence of
which one felt--well, cheap, as though there were secrets from which
one had been excluded, as though there were somewhere in this universe
a stupendous joke which alone of all others one lacked the wit to see.
It gave one a disturbed, uneasy sensation, a _mauvaise honte_.

The innate sense of personal dignity, the instinct to retire into
one’s self, the affectation of repose and self-sufficiency which leads
one lightly to wave aside a subject one does not understand, to pass
it over for other and more familiar topics--these were ineffectual.
Curiosity perhaps in a sense much less refined than that in which
Matthew Arnold considered it when he exalted it to the plane of the
higher virtues, broke down reticence, and, at last I asked, and even
begged my companion to tell me what he meant. But he was implacable; he
had reached, it appeared, a stage of development in which the opinions
of others were of no consequence; an altitude from which he could
regard the race of men impersonally, and permit them to stumble on in
error, without the desire to set them right. It was quite useless to
question him, and in the end the only satisfaction he would give me was
to say, with an effort of dismissing the subject:

“Ask some of the boys.”

For a young citizen to whom society is yet an illusion, lying, in
Emerson’s figure, before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men
and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the center, round which all
arrange themselves the best they can, to have one of those oak-trees
torn violently up by the roots, is to experience a distinct shock. And
by two words, and an expression that played for an instant in lowered
eyes, and about lips that were more concerned just then with the
flattened end of a fresh cigarette than the divulgence of great truths!
Yes, decidedly a shock, to leave one shaken for days. If there were any
doubt as to what to do with anarchists, what was the use of going on
with the study of the law? I went out from that cheap little restaurant
in Fifth Avenue, into Chicago’s depressing midnight streets--and the
oak tree never took root again. For, as Charlie R---- had lightly
suggested, I asked the boys, and by the boys he meant, of course, the
reporters.

They were boys in spirit, though in the knowledge of this world they
were as aged men, some of whom had seen so much of life that they
were able to dwell with it only by refusing any longer to accept it
seriously. They formed in that day an unusual group, gathered in the
old Whitechapel Club, and many of their names have since become known
to literature. They, or most of them, had worked on the anarchist
cases, from the days of the strike in McCormick’s reaper works, down
to the night when the vivid pen of Charlie Seymour could describe the
spark that soared in a parabolic curve from the alley into Haymarket
Square, and then to the black morning of the hanging; and they knew.

It was all very simple, too. If it were not for the tragedy, and the
wrong that is so much worse than any tragedy, one might almost laugh at
the simplicity. It shows the power of words, the force of phrases, the
obdurate and terrible tyranny of a term. The men who had been hanged
were called anarchists, when, as it happens, they were men, just men.
And out of that original error in terminology there was evolved that
overmastering fear which raved and slew in a frenzy of passion that
decades hence will puzzle the psychologist who studies the mind of
the crowd. And the student of ethics will find in the event another
proof of the inerrancy and power of that old law of moral action and
reaction, according to which hatred ceaseth not by hatred, but by love
alone. It may be found stated accurately and simply in the Sermon on
the Mount, and there is still hope that Christendom, after another
thousand years or so, may discover it, and drawing therefrom the law of
social relations, apply it to human affairs, and so solve the problems
that trouble and perplex mankind.




VII


In speaking of the group of newspaper writers who formed the
Whitechapel Club, augmented as they were by artists, and musicians
and physicians and lawyers, I would not give the impression that they
were in any sense reformers, or actuated by the smug and forbidding
spirit which too often inspires that species. They were, indeed,
wisely otherwise, and they were, I think, wholly right minded in their
attitude toward what are called public questions, and of these they had
a deep and perspicacious understanding, and it will be easy to imagine
that the cursory comments on passing phases of the human spectacle of
such minds as those of Charles Goodyear Seymour, Finley Peter Dunne,
George Ade, Ben King, Opie Reed, Alfred Henry Lewis, and his brother
William E. Lewis, Frederick Upham Adams, Thomas E. Powers, Horace
Taylor, Wallace Rice, Arthur Henry, and a score of others were apt to
be entertaining and instructive, though they were uttered with such wit
and humor that they were never intended to be instructive.

The club had been founded late in the eighties, and although it endured
less than ten years, it still lives in the minds of newspaper and
literary men as one of the most remarkable of Bohemian clubs. It had
its rooms in the rear of a little saloon, conducted by Henry Koster in
“newspaper alley,” as Calhoun Place was more generally called, near
the buildings of the _Chicago News_ and the _Chicago Herald_, and it
somehow gathered to itself many of the clever men of Chicago who were
writing for the press, and a few intimate spirits in other lines of
work, but of sympathetic spirit. For a while the club was nameless, but
one afternoon a group were sitting in one of the rooms when a newsboy
passed through the alley and cried: “All about the latest Whitechapel
murder!” Seymour paused with a stein of beer half lifted, and said:
“We’ll call the new club the ‘Whitechapel Club.’”

I suppose the grewsome connotations of the name led to our practice
of collecting relics of the tragedies we were constantly reporting.
When he came back from the Dakotas, where he had been reporting the
Sioux War, Seymour brought back from the battles a number of skulls of
Indians, and blankets drenched in blood, which were hung on the walls
of the club. From that time on it became the practice of sheriffs
and newspaper men everywhere to send anything of that kind to the
Whitechapel Club. The result was that within a few years it had a large
collection of skulls of criminals, and some physicians discovered,
or thought they discovered, differences between these skulls and the
skulls of those who were not criminals, or, if they were, had not been
caught at it.

These and the ropes of hangmen and the various mementos of crimes were
the decorations of the club rooms, and on Saturday nights the hollow
eyes of those skulls looked down on many a lively scene.

Admission to the club was obtained in a peculiar way. An applicant
for membership had his name proposed, and it was then posted on a
bulletin-board. He was on probation for thirty days, during which he
had to be at the club at least five days in the week, in order to
become acquainted with the members. Within that time any member could
tear his name down, and that ended his candidacy. When his name finally
came up for voting it required the full vote of the club to get him in.

And then we grew prosperous, and acquiring a building farther down the
alley, we had it decorated in a somber manner, with a notable table,
shaped like a coffin, around which we gathered. But the prosperity and
the fame of the club led to its end. Rich and important men of Chicago
sought membership. Some were admitted, then more, and as a result the
club lost its Bohemian character, and finally disbanded.




VIII


Those who are able to recall the symposium of these minds will no doubt
always see the humorous face of Charlie Seymour as the center of the
coterie, a young man with such a _flair_ for what was news, with such
an instinct for word values, such real ability as a writer, and such
a quaint and original strain of humor as to make him the peer of any,
a young man who would have gone far and high could he have lived. An
early fate overtook him, as it overtook Charlie Perkins and Charlie
Almy and Ben King, but their fate had the mellowing kindness of the
fact that all who knew them can never think of them, with however much
regret, without a smile at some remembered instance of their unfailing
humor.

When I mentioned them, I had fully intended to give some instances of
that humor, but when it was not of a raciness, it was of such a rare
and delicate charm, such a fleeting, evanescent quality, that it is
impossible to separate it from all that was going on about it. It is
easy enough to recall if not to evoke again the scene in which Ben
King and Charlie Almy, sitting for three hours at a stretch, gave a
wholly impromptu impersonation of two solemn missionaries just returned
from some unmapped wilderness and recounting their deeds in order to
inspire contributions; it is not difficult either to recall the slight
figure of Charlie Seymour, with his red hair, his comedian’s droll
face, and to listen to him recounting those adventures which life
was ever offering him, whether on one of his many journeys as a war
correspondent to the region of the Dakotas when his friends among the
Ogallalla and Brûlé Sioux were on the war-path again, or in some less
picturesque tragedy he had been reporting nearer home--say a murder in
South Clark Street; but, like so many of the keener joys of life, the
charm of his stories was fleeting and gone with the moment that gave
them.

His humor colored everything he wrote, as the humor of Finley Peter
Dunne colored everything he wrote; and both were skilled in the art
of the news story. We were all reading Kipling in those days, and
Mr. Dunne was so clever in adapting his terse style to the needs
of the daily reportorial life that when one night a private shot a
comrade in the barracks at Fort Sheridan, and Mr. Dunne was detailed
to report the tragedy, he found it in every detail so exactly like
Kipling’s story “In the Matter of a Private,” that he was overcome by
the despair of having to write a tale that had already been told. He
resisted the temptation, if there was any temptation, nobly and wrote
the tale with a bald simplicity that no doubt enhanced its effect.
He had not then begun to report the Philosophy of Mr. Dooley, though
there was a certain Irishman in Chicago responsive to the name of
Colonel Thomas Jefferson Dolan, whom, in his capacity of First Ward
Democrat, Mr. Dunne frequently interviewed for his paper without the
cramping influences of a previous visitation on the Colonel, and these
interviews showed much of the color and spirit of those Dooley articles
which later were to make him famous. He already knew, of course,
and frequently enjoyed communion with the prototype of Mr. Dooley,
Mr. James McGarry, who had a quaint philosophy of his own which Mr.
Dunne one day rendered in a little article entitled “Mr. McGarry’s
Philosophy.” The familiarity so wounded Mr. McGarry, however (he
was a man of simple dignity and some sensitiveness), that Mr. Dunne
thereafter adopted another name for the personage through which he was
so long and so brilliantly to express himself, though it was not until
after the Spanish War that the wide public was to recognize the talent
which was already so abundantly recognized by Mr. Dunne’s friends.

Charlie Seymour did not read as much as some of his companions;
perhaps it was that fact that gave such an original flavor to what he
wrote. His elder brother, Mr. Horatio W. Seymour, was the editor of
the _Herald_, a newspaper famed for the taste and even beauty of its
typographical appearance. It looked somewhat like the New York _Sun_,
and under Mr. Seymour was as carefully edited. It was the organ of
the Democracy in the northwest, and I suppose no direct or immediate
influence was more potent in bringing on the wide Democratic victory in
the congressional election of 1890 than the brilliant editorials on the
tariff which Mr. Horatio Seymour wrote. They were, I remember, one of
the delights of Frank Hurd, and it was through Hurd’s influence that I
was on the staff of that paper, reporting political events.

We were all more or less employed in reporting political events in
that stirring year, and were kept busy in following and recording the
sayings of the orators of both parties. It was characteristic of Mr.
Dunne that after a sober column giving the gist of a speech by Joseph
B. Foraker, then lately governor, and afterward senator of Ohio, in
which he waved the bloody shirt in the fiery manner which in those
days characterized him, Mr. Dunne should have concluded his article
sententiously: “Then the audience went out to get the latest news of
the battle of Gettysburg.”

But it was typical of Charlie Seymour that when he was detailed to
accompany Thomas B. Reed, Speaker of the Billion Dollar Congress, he
should have been so fascinated by the whiskers of the Illinois farmers
who crowded about the rear platform of the Speaker’s train, that he
devoted half a column to a description of those adornments which long
was celebrated as a classic in the traditions of Chicago reporters, to
be recalled by them as they would recall, for instance, certain of the
sayings of the late Joseph Medill.

Mr. Medill, of course, moved in an element far above that which was
natural to the reporters, and the figure of the great editor of the
_Tribune_ filled the imagination completely. I used to like his
low-tariff editorials, though they became high-tariff editorials during
national campaigns, the rate of percentage of protection rising like a
thermometer in the heat of political excitement,--a tendency the rate
invariably reveals the nearer its objective is approached.

Mr. Medill, as was well known, was not an admirer of President
Harrison, and there came down into our world an evidence of the
fact in a story which Mr. Frank Brooks, a political writer on the
_Tribune_, told us. It was at the time that President Harrison made
one of those speaking tours which, beginning with President Johnson’s
“swing around the circle,” have grown increasingly familiar to those
of the electorate who observe their presidents and rush to the railway
station to hear them speaking as they flash by. His managing editor had
assigned Mr. Brooks to go to Galesburg, catch the President’s special
and make the journey with him, and just as he was giving directions as
to the column or two which Mr. Brooks was to send in daily, Mr. Medill
went shuffling through the editorial room, bearing a great pile of
those foreign exchanges he was so fond of reading. The managing editor
explained to Mr. Medill the mission he was committing to Mr. Brooks,
and the old editor stood a moment looking at them, then raised his
ear-trumpet and said in his queer voice:

“What did you say?”

“I said, I’d just been telling Mr. Brooks to go down to Galesburg
to-night, catch the President’s special, and send us a column or so
each night of his speeches.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Medill, and then he drily added: “_What for?_”




IX


It was, of course, for a young correspondent who hod an eager curiosity
about life, an interesting experience to go on a journey like that, and
it was with delight that, one snowy morning in the late autumn of that
year, I left Chicago to go on a little trip down through Indiana with
James G. Blaine. He was the secretary of state in President Harrison’s
cabinet, a position in which, as it turned out, he was unhappy, as most
men are apt to be in public positions, though a sort of cruel and evil
fascination will not let them give up the vain pursuit of them, vainest
perhaps when they are won. When I reached the station that morning,
Mr. Blaine was already there, walking up and down the platform arm in
arm with his son Emmons. He was a gray man, dressed in gray clothes,
with spats made of the cloth of his habit, and there was about him
an air of vague sadness, which in his high countenance became almost
a pain, though just then, in the companionship of the son he loved,
there was, for a little while, the expression of a mild happiness,
maybe a solace. His face was of a grayish, almost luminous pallor, and
his silver hair and beard were in the same key. William Walter Phelps,
then our minister to Germany, was traveling with him, and on our way
down to South Bend the constant entrance of plain citizens from the
other coaches into our car filled Mr. Phelps with a kind of wonder.
Commercial travelers, farmers, all sorts and conditions of men, entered
and introduced themselves to Mr. Blaine, and he sat and talked with
them all in that simplicity which marks the manners, even if it has
departed the spirit of the republic.

“It is a remarkable sight you are witnessing,” said Mr. Phelps to us
reporters, “a sight you could witness in no other country in the world.
There is the premier of a great government, and yet the commonest man
may approach him without ceremony, and talk to him as though he were
nobody.”

Fresh from his life at a foreign court, he was viewing events from
that foreign point of view, perhaps thinking just then in European
sequences, and since there was such simplicity, it was not hard for
any of us to have conversation with our premier. Mr. Blaine had just
come from Ohio where he had been speaking in McKinley’s district, and
he understood the political situation so perfectly that he said, in the
frankness of a conversation that was not to be reported, that McKinley
was certain to be defeated; indeed he foresaw, though it required no
very great vision to do that, the reverse that was to overtake his
party in the congressional elections.

With my interest in the tariff question, which then seemed to me so
fundamental, I did not lose the opportunity to ask Mr. Blaine about
his reciprocity project: but after a while the conversation turned
to more personal subjects. When he learned that I was from Ohio, he
asked me suddenly if I could name the counties that formed the several
congressional districts of the state. I could not, of course, do that,
and I supposed no one in the world could do it or ever wish to do it;
but he could, and with a naïve pride in the accomplishment he did, and
then astounded me by saying that he could almost match the feat with
any state in the Union.

It was the only enthusiasm the poor man showed all that day, and
when we reached South Bend, there was a _contretemps_ that might
have afforded Mr. Phelps further food for reflection on the lack of
ceremony in America. When the premier stepped off the train into the
wet mass of snow that covered the dirty platform of the ugly little
station, there was nowhere to be seen any evidence of a reception
for the distinguished guest. There was an old hack, or ’bus, one of
those rattling, shambling, moth-eaten vehicles that await the incoming
train at every small town in our land, with a team of forlorn horses
depressed by the weather or by life, but there was no committee of
eminent citizens, no band, nothing. The scene was bare and bleak and
cold, and the premier was plainly disgusted.

He stood there a moment and looked about him undecided, while Mr.
Phelps with sympathetic concern displayed great willingness to serve,
but was as helpless as his chief. The American sovereigns who were
loafing by the station shed looked on with the reticent detachment
which characterizes the rural American. And then the train slowly
pulled out and left us, and Mr. Blaine cast at it a glance of longing
and of reproach, as though in its sundering of the last tie with the
world of comfort, he had suffered the final indignity. There seemed to
be no course other than to take the ’bus, when suddenly a committee
rushed up, out of breath and out of countenance, and with a chorus
of apologies explained that they had met the wrong train, or gone to
another station, and so bore the premier off in triumph to dine at some
rich man’s house.

The day seemed to grow worse as it progressed, as days ill begun have
a way of doing, and when the premier in the afternoon appeared at the
meeting he was to address, his spirits had not improved, and even if
they had, the meeting was one to depress the spirits of any man. It
assembled in a barren hall, a kind of skating rink, or something of the
sort, that would have served better for a boxing match. The audience
was small, and standing about in the mud and slush they had “tramped
in,” to use our midwestern phrase, they displayed that bucolic
indifference which can daunt the most exuberant speaker. It was in no
way worthy of the man, and Mr. Blaine spoke with evident difficulty,
and so wholly lacked spirit and enthusiasm that it was impossible for
him to warm up to his subject. The speech was of that perfunctory sort
which such an atmosphere compels, one of those speeches the speaker
drags out, a word at a time, and is glad to be done with, and Mr.
Blaine bore with his fates a little while, and then almost abruptly
closed. He spoke on the tariff issue, and in defense of the McKinley
Bill, and in marshaling the evidences of our glory and prosperity,
all of which he attributed to the direct influence of the protective
tariff system, he mentioned the number of miles of railroad that had
been built, and even the increase in the nation’s population! The
speech and the occasion afforded an opportunity to a newspaper of the
opposition, which in those days of silly partizanship, was not to be
overlooked. I went back to the little hotel and wrote my story, and
since I had all the while in my mind not only partizan advantage, but
the smiles that would break out on the countenances of Charlie Seymour
and Peter Dunne and the other boys gathered in the Whitechapel Club I
did not minimise the effect of all those babies who had come to life as
a result of the protective tariff, nor all those ironical difficulties
the day had heaped upon the great man. It was not, perhaps, quite fair,
nor quite nice, but it was as fair and as nice as newspaper ethics
and political etiquette--if there are such things--require, and Mr.
Blaine himself most have had some consciousness of his partial failure,
some dissatisfaction with his effort, for I was just about to put my
story on the wire at six o’clock when he appeared, with his rich host,
and asked for me. I talked to him through the little wicket of the
telegraph office, and the conversation began inauspiciously by the rich
man’s peremptorily commanding me to let him see my stuff; he wished,
he said, to “look it over”! I was not as patient with his presumption
then as I think I could be now, for I had not learned that it was the
factory system that produces such types, men who bully the women at
home and the women and clerks and operatives in their shops, and I
denied him the right, of course. He became very angry, and blustered
through the little window, while the operator, an old telegrapher I
had known in Toledo, sat behind me waiting to send the story clicking
into Chicago on _The Herald’s_ wire. After the rich man had exhausted
himself, Mr. Blaine took his place at the window and in a mild and calm
manner, asked me for my copy, saying that he was not well, and that
he had made some slips in his speech which he did not care to have go
to the country. It was those unfortunate or fortunate babies of the
protective tariff system, and he said that the correspondent of a press
association had agreed to make the excisions if I would do so, and he
would consider it a favor if I would oblige him.

The charm of his manner had been on me all that day, and I had been
feeling sorry for him all day, too, and I was sorrier for him then
than ever, and half ashamed of some of the things I had written, but
I explained to him that I had been sent by my paper in the hope that
he might say something to the disadvantage of his own cause, and that
my duty was to report, at least, what he had said. It was one of the
hardest “noes” I ever had to say, and at last as he turned away, I
regretted, perhaps more than he, and certainly more than he ever knew,
that I could not let him revise his speech--since that is what most of
us desire to do with most of our speeches.

When that campaign ended in the overthrow of the Republican majority in
Congress, and I was sent to interview Ben Butterworth on the result,
he said, in his humorous way: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken
away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” He was not altogether cast
down by the result; in his place in Congress as a representative from
a Cincinnati district he had risen to denounce the tariff, and so had
his consolation. To me it seemed as if the people had at last entered
the promised land, that that was the day the Lord had made for his
people, but Mr. Butterworth could point out that our government was not
so democratic as the British government, for instance, since it was
not so responsive to the people’s will. Over there, of course, after
such a reverse the government would have retired, and a new one would
have been formed, but here the existing administration would remain in
power two years longer, and then, even if it lost in the presidential
election over a year must elapse before a new Congress would convene,
so that the millennium was postponed a good three years at least.




X


However, there were other interests and other delights with which to
occupy one’s self meanwhile, not the least of which was Mr. Butterworth
himself. He was then out of Congress and in Chicago as Solicitor
General of the World’s Columbian Exposition, for which Chicago was
preparing. For a while I was relieved from writing about politics, and
assigned to the World’s Fair, and there were so many distinguished men
from all over the nation associated in that enterprise that it was
very much like politics in its superficial aspects. There was, for
instance, the World’s Columbian Commission, a body created under the
authority of Congress, composed of two commissioners from each state,
appointed by its governor, and that body exactly the size of the senate
was like it in personnel and character. The witty Thomas E. Palmer of
Michigan was its president, and there were among its membership such
men as Judge Lindsay, later senator from Kentucky, Judge Harris of
Virginia, who looked like George Washington, and many other delightful
and pungent characters. But no personality among them all was more
interesting than Colonel James A. McKenzie, Judge Lindsay’s colleague
from Kentucky. He was tall and spare of frame, and his long moustache
and goatee, and the great black slouch hat he wore made him in
appearance the typical southerner of the popular imagination. He was
indeed the typical southerner by every right and tradition, by birth,
by his services in the Confederate army, by his stately courtesy, by
his love of sentiment and the picturesque, by his wit and humor and
eloquence, and his fondness for phrases. His humor sparkled in his kind
blue eyes, and it overflowed in that brilliant conversation with which
he delighted everyone about him; he could entertain you by the hour
with his comments on all phases of that life in which he found such
zest. He had been known as “Quinine Jim,” because as congressman he
had secured the reduction or the abolition of the duty on that drug,
so indispensable in malarial lands. He was fond of striking phrases;
he it was who had referred to Blaine as a Florentine mosaic; and his
reference to Mrs. Cleveland as “the uncrowned queen of America” had
delighted the Democratic convention at St. Louis which renominated her
husband for the presidency. And again at Chicago, on that memorable
night of oratory in 1892 in seconding the nomination of Cleveland on
behalf of Kentucky he stood on a chair and referred to his state as the
commonwealth “in which, thank God, the damned lie is the first lick,
where the women are so beautiful that the aurora borealis blushes with
shame, where the whiskey is so good as to make intoxication a virtue,
and the horses so fleet that lightning in comparison is but a puling
paralytic.”

During one of many pleasant afternoons in the old Grand Pacific Hotel
he began to tell us something about the chronic office holders to
be found in the capital of his state, as in most states, and said:
“If God in a moment of enthusiasm should see fit to snatch them to
His bosom I should regard it as a dispensation of divine providence
in which I could acquiesce with a fervor that would be turbulent and
even riotous.” It was in this stream of exaggeration and hyperbole
that he talked all the time, but with the coming of the winter of that
year my opportunities of listening to him were cut off. I was sent to
Springfield to report the sessions of the legislature. In the spring
a bill was under discussion for the appropriation of a large sum in
aid of the World’s Fair, and when the usual opposition developed among
those country members who have so long governed our cities in dislike
and distrust of the people in them, a delegation came down from Chicago
to lobby for the measure. It was not long until it was evident that
they were not making much headway; the difference, the distinction
in their dress and manner, their somewhat too lofty style were only
making matters worse. I took it upon myself to telegraph to James W.
Scott, the publisher of _The Herald_, apprising him of the situation,
and suggesting that Colonel McKenzie be sent down to reënforce them.
I felt that he would perhaps understand the country members better
because he understood humanity better, and besides, I wished to see
him again and hear his stories and funny sayings. He came, and after
he had associated with the members a day or so, and they had seen him
draw Kentucky “twist” from the deep pocket of the long tails of his
coat, and on one or two occasions had watched him gently pinch into a
julep the tender sprigs of mint the spring had brought to Springfield,
the appropriation for some reason was made. While he was there he said
he wished to visit the tomb of Lincoln, and it was with pride that I
got an open carriage and drove him, on an incomparable morning in June,
out to Oak Ridge cemetery. He was in a solemn mood that morning; the
visit had a meaning for him; he had fought on the other side in the
great war, but he had a better conception of the character of the noble
martyr than many a northerner, especially of the day when that tomb
was built, certainly a nobler conception of that lofty character than
is expressed in Mead’s cruel war groups--as though Lincoln had been
merely some shoulder-strapped murderer of his fellow men! The Colonel
had never been there before, and it was an occasion for him, and for
me, too, though every time I went there it was for me an occasion, as
my sojourn in Springfield was an opportunity, to induce those who had
known Lincoln to talk about him.

The tomb has a chamber in its base where there were stored a number of
things; the place, indeed, was a sort of cheap museum, and you paid to
enter there and listen to an aged custodian lecture on the “relics,”
and thrill the gaping onlooker with the details of the attempt to
steal the body, and buy a book about it, if you were morbid and silly
enough. The custodian began his lecture in that chamber, and then led
you out into the sunlight again, and up on the base of the monument,
and showed you the bronze fighters, and at last, took you down into the
crypt, on the brow of the little down that overlooks the cemetery.

There at last Colonel McKenzie stood beside the sarcophagus and after
a while the custodian came to the end of his rigmarole, and, by some
mercy, was still. And I stood aside and looked at the old Confederate
officer, standing there in that cool entrance, beside the very tomb of
Lincoln. He stood with his arms folded on his breast, his tall form
slightly bent, his big hat in his hand, and his white head bowed; he
stood there a long time, in the perfect silence of that June morning,
with thoughts, I suppose, that might have made an epic.

When at last he turned away and went around to the front of the
monument, and we were about to enter our carriage, he turned, and still
uncovered, over the little gate in the low fence that enclosed the
spot, he paused and gave his hand to the old custodian, and said:

“Colonel, I wish to express to you my appreciation of the privilege
I have had this morning of paying my respects at the shrine of the
greatest American that ever lived.”

He said it solemnly and sincerely, and then, still holding the
delighted old fellow’s hand, he went on in profound gravity:

“And I cannot go away without expressing my sense of satisfaction
in the eloquent oration you have delivered on this occasion. I was
particularly impressed, sir, by its evident lack of previous thought
and preparation.”




XI


That was the legislature which elected John M. Palmer to the United
States Senate from Illinois. The election was accomplished only after a
memorable deadlock of two months in which the Democrats of the general
assembly stood so nobly, shoulder to shoulder, that they were called
“The Immortal 101.” When they were finally reënforced by the votes of
two members elected as representatives of the Farmers’ Alliance, and
elected their man, they had a gold medal struck to commemorate their
own heroism. They were not, perhaps, exactly immortal, but they did
stand for their principles so stanchly that when they came to celebrate
their victory, some of their orators compared them to those other
immortals who held Thermopylæ.

Their principle was the popular election of United States senators, and
they had a fine exemplar of democracy in their candidate. He had been
nominated by a state convention, as had Lincoln, whom General Palmer
had known intimately and had supported both for senator and president.
He was the last of those great figures of Illinois whom the times
immediately preceding the Civil War had so abundantly brought forth.
He had commanded an army corps, he had been governor of his state, and
in 1872 a presidential possibility in the Republican party. But he had
turned to the Democrats, and after he became their senator, the first
Illinois had known since Douglas, he became a presidential possibility
in the Democratic party; that was in 1892, and whatever chances he had
he destroyed himself by coming on from Washington and declaring for
Grover Cleveland.

Four years later he was nominated for the presidency by the
conservative faction of his party. He told me, when I was finishing
my law studies under him, that he had never lost anything politically
by bolting any of the several parties he had been in, but had usually
gained in self respect by doing so; and if to the politician his whole
career presented inconsistencies, to the man of principle he must seem
wholly consistent and sincere. Certain it is that he followed that
inward spirit which alone can guide a man through the perplexities of
life, and so the principle with him came ever before the party.

He was a simple man with simple tastes, and his very simplicity was
an element of that dignity which seemed to belong to other times than
ours. The familiar figure of him along the quiet streets of Springfield
was pleasing to men and to children alike; he would go along erectly
and slowly under his great broad hat, a striking figure with his
plentiful white hair, his closely trimmed chin whiskers, the broad,
smoothly shaven upper lip distinguishing a countenance that was of
a type associated with the earlier ideals of the republic, and the
market basket he carried on his arm helped this effect. At home he was
delightful; he had a viol, and used to play it, if there were not too
many about to hear him, and if he were alone, sing a few staves of
old songs, like “Darling Nelly Gray,” and “Rosie Lee, Courting Down
in Tennessee,” and some of the old tunes he had learned in Kentucky
as a boy. He liked poetry, if it were not of the introspective modern
mood, and while I have heard of such extraordinary characters, I never
believed the stories of their endurance, until I was able to discover
in him one man who actually did read Sir Walter Scott’s novels through
every year. For the most part he had some member of his family read
them to him, and he found in them the naïve pleasure of a child. I
used to think I would remember the things he was always saying, and
the stories he was always telling about Lincoln or Douglas or Grant,
but I never could keep note-books and the more imposing sayings have
departed. Yet there flashes before the memory with the detail of a
cinematograph that scene of a winter’s evening when I entered the big
living-room in his home and there found him with his wife before the
great open fire. She was reading aloud to him from “Ivanhoe.”

“Come in, Mr. Brand,” he always addressed me by prefixing “Mr.” to my
Christian name. “Come in,” he called in his hearty voice. “We are just
storming a castle.”

He lived on to the century’s end, with a sort of gusto in life that
never failed, I think, until that day when he attended the funeral
of the last of his old contemporaries, General John M. McClernand,
that fierce old warrior who had quarreled with Grant and lived on in
Springfield until he could fight no more with anyone. Senator Palmer
came home from his funeral amused by the fact that McClernand had
been buried in the full uniform of a major-general, which he had not
worn, I suppose, since Vicksburg. When some member of Senator Palmer’s
household asked him if he should like to be buried in his uniform, he
shook his head against it, but added:

“It was all right for Mac; it was like him.”

But the end was in his thoughts; Oglesby was gone, and now McClernand
as the last of the men with whom he had fought in the great crisis, and
he went, pretty soon after that, himself. He had participated in two
great revolutionary epochs of his nation, going through the one and
penetrating though not so far into the second, a long span of life and
experience.

It was perhaps natural that he should not have divined the implications
of the second phase as clearly as he did those of the first; and though
he had helped to inaugurate the new movement, the latest urge toward
democracy in this land, he could not go so far. He was young in ’56 and
old in ’96, and as we grow old we grow conservative, whether we would
or not, and much, I suppose, in the same way.




XII


Senator Palmer’s victory in 1891, however, had raised the hopes of the
Illinois Democracy for 1892, and it was early in that year that I came
to know one of the most daring pioneers of the neo-democratic movement
in America, and the most courageous spirit of our times.

It was on a cold raw morning that I met Joseph P. Mahony, then a
Democratic member of the State Senate, who said:

“Come with me and I’ll introduce you to the next governor of Illinois.”

It was the time of year when one was meeting the next governor of
Illinois in most of the hotel corridors, or men who were trying to look
like potential governors of Illinois, so that such a remark was not to
be taken too literally; but I went, and after ascending to an upper
floor of a narrow little building in Adams Street, we entered a suite
of law offices, and there in a very much crowded, a very much littered
and a rather dingy little private room, at an odd little walnut desk,
sat John P. Altgeld.

The figure was not prepossessing; he wore his hair close-clipped in
ultimate surrender to an obstinate cowlick; his beard was closely
trimmed, too, and altogether the countenance was one made for the hands
of the cartoonists, who in the brutal fury that was so soon to blaze
upon him and to continue to blaze until it had consumed him quite,
could easily contort the features to the various purposes of an ugly
partizanship; they gave it a peculiarly sinister quality, and it is one
of the countless ironies of life that a face, sad with all the utter
woe of humanity, should have become for a season, and in some minds
remained forever, the type and symbol of all that is most abhorrent.
There was a peculiar pallor in the countenance, and the face was such
a blank mask of suffering and despair that, had it not been for the
high intelligence that shone from his eyes, it must have impressed
many as altogether lacking in expression. Certainly it seldom or never
expressed enthusiasm, or joy, or humor, though he had humor of a
certain mordant kind, as many a political opponent was to know.

He had been a judge of the Circuit Court, and was known by his
occasional addresses, his interviews and articles, as a publicist of
radical and humanitarian tendencies. He was known especially to the
laboring classes and to the poor, who, by that acute sympathy they
possess, divined in him a friend, and in the circles of sociological
workers and students, then so small and obscure as to make their views
esoteric, he was recognized as one who understood and sympathized with
their tendencies and ideals. He was accounted in those days a wealthy
man,--he was just then building one of those tall and ugly structures
of steel called “sky-scrapers,”--and now that he was spoken of for
governor this fact made him seem “available” to the politicians. Also
he had a German name, another asset in Illinois just then, when Germans
all over the state felt themselves outraged by legislation concerning
the “little red school-house,” which the Republicans had enacted when
they were in full power in the state.

But my paper did not share this enthusiasm about him; it happened to
be owned by John R. Walsh, and between Walsh and Altgeld there was a
feud, a feud that cost Altgeld his fortune, and lasted until the day
that death found him poor and crushed by all the tragedy which a closer
observer, one with a keener prescience of destiny than I, might have
read in his face from the first.

The feeling of the paper, if one may so personalize a corporation as
to endow it with emotion, was not corrected by his nomination, and
_The Herald_ had little to say of him, and what it did say was given
out in the perfunctory tone of a party organ. But as the summer wore
on, and I was able to report to my editors that all the signs pointed
to Altgeld’s election, I was permitted to write an article in which
I tried to describe his personality and to give some impression of
the able campaign he was making. Horace Taylor drew some pictures to
illustrate it, and I had the satisfaction of knowing that it gave
Altgeld pleasure, while at the same time to me at least it revealed for
an instant the humanness of the man.

He sent for me--he was then in offices in his new sky-scraper--and
asked if I could procure for him Horace Taylor’s pictures; he hesitated
a moment, and then, as though it were a weakness his Spartan nature was
reluctant to reveal, he told me that he intended to have my article
republished in a newspaper in Mansfield, Ohio, the town whence he had
come, where he had taught school, and where he had met the gracious
lady who was his wife. He talked for a while that afternoon about his
youth, about his poverty and his struggles, and then suddenly lapsed
into a silence, with his eyes fastened on me. I wondered what he was
looking at; his gaze was disconcerting, and it made me self-conscious
and uneasy, till he said:

“Where could one get a cravat like the one you have on?”

It was, I remember--because of the odd incident--an English scarf of
blue, quite new. I had tried to knot it as Ben Cable of the Democratic
National Committee knotted his, and it seemed that such a little
thing should not be wanting to the happiness of a man who, by all the
outward standards, had so much to gratify him as Altgeld had, and I
said--with some embarrassment, and some doubt as to the taste I was
exhibiting--“Why, you may have this one.”

In a moment his face changed, the mask fell, and he shook his head and
said: “No, it would not look like that on me.”

After his election it was suggested to me that I might become
his secretary, but I declined; in my travels over the state as a
political correspondent I was always meeting aged men, seemingly quite
respectable and worthy and entirely well meaning, who were introduced
not so much by name as such and such a former governor’s private
secretary; though like the moor which Browning crossed, they had

        ... names of their own,
  And a certain use in the world, no doubt.

But I did take a position in the office of the secretary of state that
offered the opportunity I had been longing for; I wished to finish
my law studies, and, deeper down than any ambition for the bar, I was
nourishing a desire to write, or if it does not seem too pretentious,
an ambition in literature; and neither of these aims could well be
accomplished, say from midnight on, after working all day on a morning
newspaper.

It was a pleasant change. Springfield was lovely in the spring, which
came to it earlier than it visited Chicago, and it was a relief to
escape the horrid atmosphere of a great brutal city which as a reporter
it had seemed my fate to behold for the most part at night. There was a
sense of spaciousness in the green avenues of the quiet town, and there
was pleasant society, and better perhaps than all there were two big
libraries in the Capitol, the law library of the Supreme Court and the
state library; and after the noisy legislature had adjourned a peace
fell on the great, cool stone pile that was almost academic.

Twice or thrice a day Governor Altgeld was to be seen passing
through its vast corridors, his head bent thoughtfully, rapt afar
from the things about him in those dreams of social amelioration
which had visited him so much earlier than they came to most of his
contemporaries. He had read much, and during his residence there the
executive mansion had the atmosphere of intellectual culture. Whenever
I went over there, which I did now and then with his secretary for
luncheon or for an evening at cards, our talk was almost always of
books.

We were all reading George Meredith in those days, and Meredith’s
greater contemporary, Thomas Hardy. “Tess” had just appeared, and
it would be about that time that “Jude” was running as a serial in
_Harper’s Magazine_, though with many elisions and under its tentative
titles of “The Simpleton” and “Hearts Insurgent”; and we all fell
completely under a fascination which has never failed of its weird
and mysterious charm, so that I have read all his works, down to his
latest poems, over and over again. Hardy is, perhaps, the greatest
intelligence on our planet now that Tolstoy, from whom he so vastly
differed, is gone, and Altgeld’s whole career might have served him,
had he ever chosen to write of those experiences that are less implicit
in human nature, and more explicit in the superficial aspects of public
careers, as an example of his own pagan theory of the contrariety of
human affairs and the spite of the Ironic Spirits.

I was reading, too, the novels of Mr. William Dean Howells, as I always
have been whenever there was a moment to spare, and it was with a shock
of peculiar delight and a sense of corroboration almost authoritative
that I learned that Mr. Howells also had given voice to those very same
profound and troubling convictions which Charlie R---- had set me on
the track of two years before.




XIII


It was not in any one of Mr. Howells’s novels or essays, except
inferentially, that I learned this, but among some musty documents the
worms were eating up away down in the foundations of the State House.

My work in the office of the secretary of state involved the care of
the state’s archives. The oldest of these were stored in a vault in
the cellar of the huge pile, and the discovery had just been made that
some kind of insect, which the state entomologist knew all about,
was riddling those records with little holes,--piercing them through
and through. In consequence a new vault was prepared, and steel
filing cases were set up in it, and the records removed to this safer
sanctuary.

It was a tedious and stupid task, until we came one day to file what
were called the papers in the anarchist case. Officially they related
to the application for the commutation of the sentences of the four
men, Spies, Engel, Fischer, and Parsons, who had been hanged, and for
the pardon of the three who were then confined in the penitentiary
at Joliet, Fielden and Schwab for life, and old Oscar Neebe for
fifteen years. Fielden and Schwab had been sentenced to death with
the four who had been killed, but Governor Oglesby had commuted their
sentences to imprisonment for life; Neebe’s original sentence had
been for the fifteen years he was then serving. The papers consisted
of communications to the governor, great petitions, and letters and
telegrams, many sent in mercy, and some in the spirit of reason, asking
for clemency, many in a wild hysteria of fear, and the hideous hate
that is born of fear, begging the governor to let “justice” take its
course.

There were the names of many prominent men and women signed to these
communications; among them was a request signed by many authors in
England requesting clemency, but there was no appeal stronger, and no
protest braver, than that in the letter which Mr. Howells had written
to a New York newspaper analyzing the case and showing the amazing
injustice of the whole proceeding. Mr. Howells had first gone, so
he told me in after years, to the aged poet Whittier, whose gentle
philosophy might have moved him to a mood against that public wrong,
and then to George William Curtis, but they had advised him to write
the protest himself, and he had done so, and he had done it better
and more bravely than either of them could have done out of the great
conscience and the great heart that have always been on the side of
the weak and the oppressed, with a mercy which when it is practised
by mankind is always so much nearer the right and the divine than our
crude and generally cruel attempts at justice can ever be.

But all these prayers had fallen on official ears that--to use a
grotesque figure--were so closely pressed to the ground that they could
not hear; and there was nothing to do, since they were so many and so
bulky that no latest-improved and patented steel filing-case could hold
them, but to have a big box made and lock them up in that for all time,
forgotten, like so many other records of injustice, out of the minds of
men.

But not entirely; injustice was never for long out of the mind of John
P. Altgeld, and during all those first months of his administration he
had been brooding over this notable instance of injustice, and he had
come to his decision. He knew the cost to him; he had just come to the
governorship of his state, and to the leadership of his party, after
its thirty years of defeat, and he realized what powerful interests
would be frightened and offended if he were to turn three forgotten men
out of prison; he understood how partizanship would turn the action to
its advantage.

It mattered not that most of the thoughtful men in Illinois would tell
you that the “anarchists” had been improperly convicted, that they
were not only entirely innocent of the murder of which they had been
accused, but were not even anarchists; it was simply that the mob had
convicted them in one of the strangest frenzies of fear that ever
distracted a whole community, a case which all the psychologists of all
the universities in the world might have tried, without getting at the
truth of it--much less a jury in a criminal court.

And so, one morning in June, very early, I was called to the governor’s
office, and told to make out pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab.
“And do it yourself,” said the governor’s secretary, “and don’t say
anything about it to anybody.”

I cannot tell in what surprise, in what a haze, or with what emotions
I went about that task. I got the blanks and the records, and, before
the executive clerk, whose work it was, had come down, I made out those
three pardons, in the largest, roundest hand I could command, impressed
them with the Great Seal of State, had the secretary of state sign
them, and took them over to the governor’s office. I was admitted to
his private room, and there he sat, at his great flat desk. The only
other person in the room was Dreier, a Chicago banker, who had never
wearied, it seems, in his efforts to have those men pardoned. He was
standing, and was very nervous; the moment evidently meant much to him.
The Governor took the big sheets of imitation parchment, glanced over
them, signed his name to each, laid down the pen, and handed the papers
across the table to Dreier. The banker took them, and began to say
something. But he only got as far as----

“Governor, I hardly”--when he broke down and wept. Altgeld made an
impatient gesture; he was gazing out of the window in silence, on the
elm-trees in the yard. He took out his watch, told Dreier he would miss
his train--Dreier was to take the Alton to Joliet, deliver the pardons
to the men in person, and go on into Chicago with them that night--and
Dreier nervously rolled up the pardons, took up a little valise, shook
hands, and was gone.

On the table was a high pile of proofs of the document in which
Governor Altgeld gave the reasons for his action. It was an able paper;
one might well rank it among state papers, and I suppose no one now, in
these days, when so many of Altgeld’s democratic theories are popular,
would deny that his grounds were just and reasonable, or that he had
done what he could to right a great wrong; though he would regret that
so great a soul should have permitted itself to mar the document by
expressions of hatred of the judge who tried the case. But perhaps it
is not so easy to be calm and impersonal in the midst of the moving
event, as it is given to others to be long afterward.

But whatever feelings he may have had, he was calm and serene ever
after. I saw him as I was walking down to the Capitol the next morning.
It was another of those June days which now and then are so perfect
on the prairies. The Governor was riding his horse--he was a gallant
horseman--and he bowed and smiled that faint, wan smile of his, and
drew up to the curb a moment. There was, of course, but one subject
then, and I said:

“Well, the storm will break now.”

“Oh, yes,” he replied, with a not wholly convincing air of throwing off
a care, “I was prepared for that. It was merely doing right.”

I said something to him then to express my satisfaction in the great
deed that was to be so wilfully, recklessly, and cruelly misunderstood.
I did not say all I might have said, for I felt that my opinions could
mean so little to him. I have wished since that I had said more,--said
something, if that might have been my good fortune, that could perhaps
have made a great burden a little easier for that brave and tortured
soul. But he rode away with that wan, persistent smile. And the storm
did break, and the abuse it rained upon him broke his heart; but I
never again heard him mention the anarchist case.




XIV


The newspapers were so extravagant in their abuse of Governor Altgeld
for his pardon of the anarchists that one not knowing the facts might
have received the impression that the Governor had already pardoned
most of the prisoners in the penitentiary, and would presently pardon
those that remained, provided the crimes they had committed, or were
said to have committed, had been heinous enough. The fact was that he
issued no more pardons, proportionately at least, than the governors
who preceded him, since notwithstanding the incessant grinding of
society’s machinery of vengeance the populations of prisons grow with
the populations outside of them.

But partizanship was intense in those days; and the fact that Governor
Altgeld was responsible for such a hegira from the Capitol at
Springfield as Colonel McKenzie had longed to behold in the Capitol
at Frankfort exacerbated the bitter feeling. The sentiment thus
created, however, did increase the hopes of convicts, and the Governor
was continually importuned by their friends--those of them that had
friends, which was apt to be a pitifully small percentage of the whole
number--to give them back their liberty. A few weeks after the pardons
had been issued to the anarchists, George Brennan of Braidwood, then a
clerk in the State House, told me a moving story of a young man of his
acquaintance, who was then confined in the penitentiary at Joliet. The
young man was dying of tuberculosis, and his mother, having no other
hope than that he might be released to die at home, had made her appeal
to Brennan, and he had seen to the filing of an application in due
form, and now he asked me if I would not call the Governor’s attention
to it. I got out the great blue envelope containing the thin papers in
the case--they were as few as the young man’s friends--and took them
over to the Governor, but no sooner had I laid them on his desk and
made the first hesitating and tentative approach to the subject, than I
divined the moment to be wholly inauspicious. The Governor did not even
look at the papers, he did not even touch the big blue linen envelope,
but shook his head and said:

“No, no, I will not pardon any more. The people are opposed to it; they
do not believe in mercy; they love revenge; they want the prisoners
punished to the bitterest extremity.”

I did not then know how right he was in his cynical generalization,
though I did know that his decision was so far from his own heart
that it was no decision at all, but merely the natural human reaction
against all the venom that had been voided upon him, and I went away
then, and told Brennan that we must wait until the Governor was in
another mood.

Three or four days afterward I met the Governor one morning as he
was passing through the rotunda of the State House, his head bent
in habitual abstraction, and seeing me in what seemed always some
subconscious way he stopped and said:

“Oh, by the way: that pardon case you spoke of the other morning--I
was somewhat hasty I fear, and out of humor. If you’ll get the papers
I’ll see what can be done.”

I knew of course what could be done, and knew then that it would be
done, and I made haste to get the papers, which had been kept on my
desk awaiting that propitious season which I had the faith to feel
would come sooner or later, though I had not expected it to come quite
so soon as that. I already anticipated the gladness that would light up
Brennan’s good Irish face when I handed him the pardon for his friend,
and I could dramatize the scene in that miner’s cottage in Braidwood
when the pardoned boy flew to his mother’s arms. I intended to say
nothing then to Brennan, however, but to wait until the pardon, signed
and sealed, could be delivered into his hands, but as I was going
across the hall to the Governor’s chambers I encountered Brennan, and
then of course could not hold back the good news. And so I told him,
looking into his blue eyes to behold the first ripple of the smile
I expected to see spread over his face; but there was no smile. He
regarded me quite soberly, shook his head, and said:

“It’s too late now.”

And he drew from his pocket a telegram, and, without any need to read
it, said:

“He died last night.”

I took the papers back and had them filed away among those cases that
had been finally disposed of, though that formality could not dispose
of the case for me. The Governor was waiting for the papers, and at
last when the morning had almost worn away I went over to his chambers
to add another fardel to that heavy load which I had thought it was to
be my lot that day to see lightened in the doing of an act of grace and
pity. I told him as he sat alone at his desk, and the shade of sorrow
deepened a moment on his pale face; but he said nothing, and I was glad
to go.

The poor little tragedy had its impressions for me, and it was not
long until I thought I saw in it the motive of a story, which at once
I began to write. The theme was the embarrassment which a governor’s
conscience created for him because during a critical campaign he knew
it to be his duty to pardon a notorious convict,--and I invented the
situations and expedients to bear the tale along to that thrilling
climax in which the governor was delivered out of his difficulty by
the most opportune death of the convict, whom a higher hand could
dramatically be said to have pardoned. I worked very hard on the story,
and thought it pretty fine, and I sent it away at last to an eastern
magazine. And then I waited, and at length a letter came saying that
the story was well enough thought of in that editorial room to hold
it until the editor-in-chief should return from Europe and hand down
a final decision. I waited for weeks, and then one morning there on
my desk was an envelope, ominous in its bigness; it was one of those
letters you do not have to open in order to read them, because you
know what they say; I knew my manuscript had come back. But when I
opened the package, instead of the familiar slip of rejection, there
was a letter; the editor liked the story, saw much in it, he said,
but felt--and quite rightly I am sure--that its ending, with the
convict dying in the very nick of time to save the governor from his
embarrassment, was an evasion of the whole moral issue; besides, the
conclusion was too melodramatic,--that was the word he used,--and would
I change it?

The day after all was bright and cheerful; I remember it well, the
sun lying on the State House lawns, their green dotted with the gold
of dandelions, and the trees twisting their leaves almost rapturously
in a sparkling air we did not often breathe on those humid prairies.
And--though this has nothing whatever to do with the case, and enters
it only as one of those incidents that linger in the memory--William
Jennings Bryan was there that day, calling on the Governor and the
Secretary of State. He was then a young congressman from Nebraska, and
he made a speech; but I was interested in the story far more than in
politics or any speech about it, even the brilliant speech of a man
who so soon, and with such remarkable _élan_, was to charge across the
country on the hosts of privilege.

And I changed the story; I made that poor harried governor drain
his bitter cup of duty to the lees, and gave the story an ending
so remorselessly logical, so true to the facts and fates of human
experience, that it might have been as depressing as one of Hardy’s
“Little Ironies”--could it have resembled them in any other way,
which of course it could not, unless it were in that imitation with
which the last author I had been reading was pretty sure though all
unconsciously to be flattered. I changed the story, and sent the MS.
back to the waiting editor; and it was returned as the string snaps
back to the bow, with a letter that showed plainly that his interest in
the tale had all evaporated. He had no regrets, it appeared, save one
perhaps, since he concluded his letter by saying:

“Besides, you have destroyed the fine dramatic ending which the story
possessed in its first draft.”

The experience uprooted another of society’s oak-trees for me, and
it has continued to lie there, with the roots of its infallibility
withering whitely in the air, though humanity still somehow continues
to arrange itself about the institution as best it can. This process
of uprooting, I suppose, goes on in life to the very end; but it is
wholesome after all, since life grows somehow easier after one has
learned that human beings are all pretty human and pretty much alike
in their humanness, and the great service of literature to mankind has
been, and more and more will be, I hope, to teach human beings this
salutary and consoling lesson.

But, in no way despairing, I kept the manuscript by me, and when I
was not trying to write other stories I was retouching it, until in
the end its fate was almost that of the portrait which the artist in
one of Balzac’s stories kept on trying to improve until it was but
a meaningless scumble of gray, with no likeness to anything in this
universe. Its fate was not quite that bad, however, since it made for
me a friend.




XV


The incident, like that on which the story itself was founded, occurred
in the course of another effort to induce the Governor to save a poor
wretch from the gallows. The autumn preceding, just when the World’s
Fair at Chicago was at its apogee, a half-crazed boy had assassinated
Carter Harrison, the old mayor of that city, and had been promptly
tried and condemned to death. The time for the execution of the
sentence drew on, and two or three days before the black event I had a
telegram from Peter Dunne and other newspaper friends in Chicago asking
me to urge the governor, or the acting governor as it happened at that
time to be, to commute the sentence to one of imprisonment for life.
The boy, so the telegrams said, was clearly insane, and had been at the
time of his crazy and desperate deed; his case had not been presented
with the skill that might have saved him, or at least might have saved
another in such a plight; there had been the customary hue and cry, the
most cherished process of the English law, “and,” Dunne concluded, “do
get Joe Gill to let him off.”

Joe Gill was Joseph B. Gill, the young Lieutenant-Governor of the
state, and because Governor Altgeld was just then out of the state he
was on the bridge as acting governor. Gill had been one of the Immortal
101, and as a representative had made a record in support of certain
humane measures in behalf of the miners of the state. The newspaper
correspondents had had pleasure in celebrating him and his work in
their despatches, and because of his popularity among the miners, to
say nothing of his popularity among the newspaper men, he had been
nominated for lieutenant-governor on the ticket with Altgeld. There was
in our relations a _camaraderie_ which put any thought of presumption
out of the question; besides, I was always so much opposed to the
killing of human beings, especially to that peculiarly horrible form of
killing which the state deliberately and in cold blood commits under
the euphemism of “capital punishment,” that I was always ready to ask
any governor to commute a sentence of death that had been pronounced
against anybody; so that it seemed a simple matter to ask Joe Gill,
himself the heart of kindness, to save the life of this boy whose soul
had wandered so desperately astray in the clouds which darkened it.

Early the next morning--the telegrams had come at night--I went over
to the governor’s office, and the governor’s private secretary told
me that Lieutenant-Governor Gill had not yet appeared, and as a good
secretary, anxious to protect his chief, he asked:

“What do you want to see him about?”

“This Prendergast they’re going to hang in Chicago next Friday.”

At this a man sitting in the room near the secretary’s desk looked up
with a sudden access of intense interest; and, starting from his chair
and transfixing me with a sharp glance, he asked:

“What interest have you in the Prendergast case?”

“None,” I said, “except that I don’t want to have him, or anybody,
hanged.”

On the man’s face, tired, with the expression of world-weariness life
gives to the countenance behind which there has been too much serious
contemplation of life, a face that seemed prematurely wrinkled, there
suddenly appeared a smile as winning as a woman’s, and he said in a
voice that had the timbre of human sympathy and the humor of a peculiar
drawl:

“Well, you’re all right, then.”

It thereupon occurred to the governor’s secretary to introduce us, and
so I made the acquaintance of Clarence Darrow. He had taken it upon
himself to neglect his duties as the attorney of some of the railroads
and other large corporations in Chicago long enough to come down to
Springfield on his own initiative and responsibility to plead with the
Governor for this lad’s life (he was always going on some such Quixotic
errand of mercy for the poor and the friendless), and we retired to the
governor’s ante-chamber to await the coming of Gill. We talked for a
while about the Prendergast case, which might have had more sympathetic
consideration had it not persisted as the Carter Harrison case in
the mind of that public, which when its latent spirit of vengeance
is aroused can so easily become the mob, but it was not long until I
discovered that Darrow had read books other than those of the law,
and for an hour we talked of Tolstoy and the other great Russians,
and of Thomas Hardy and of Mr. Howells, to enumerate no more of the
long catalogue of those realists whom we liked in common, and when I
discovered that he actually knew Mr. Howells, knew him personally, as
the saying is, I could feel that poor Prendergast, though I had never
seen him in my life, or scarcely ever thought of him until the night
before, had done me one service at least, and it made me all the more
anxious to save him.

When Joe Gill’s tall Egyptian form came swinging into the room our
talk of books was interrupted long enough to arrange for a hearing
that afternoon, and then we resumed our talk, and it endured through
luncheon and after, and I left him only long enough to have a
conversation with Gill and to ask him as a sort of personal favor to an
old friend to spare the boy’s life.

At two o’clock the hearing was called. The reporters and the governor’s
secretary and George Brennan and I made the audience, and Gill sat
up erectly in the governor’s chair to hear the appeal. Darrow asked
me the proper address for a governor, and I said since this was the
lieutenant-governor I thought “Your Excellency” would be propitiative,
and Darrow made one of those eloquent appeals for mercy of which he
is the complete master. It moved us all, but the Lieutenant-Governor
gathered himself together and refused it, and Darrow went back to
Chicago to unfold those legal technicalities which make our law
so superior to other forms in that they can stay the hand of its
vengeance. He did not succeed in the end, and the boy was hanged, and
murder has gone on in Chicago since, I understand, the same as before.
But Darrow could not leave Springfield until midnight of that day, and
we talked about books all the evening, and when he boarded his train
he had in his valise the MS. of my story about another governor and
another pardon, concerning which he was charged to answer a certain
question to which all my doubts and perplexities could be reduced,
namely: “Is it worth while, and if not, is there any use in going on
and trying to write one that is?”

I had to wait almost as long for his decision as though he had been an
editor himself, but when I called at his office in Chicago one morning
in the autumn to get the MS., and he told me that his answer to my
question was “yes,” and that he would, if I agreed, send the story to
Mr. Howells, I was as happy as though he had been an editor and had
accepted it for publication. I could not agree to its being sent on to
weary Mr. Howells, but took it back with me to Springfield, in hope, if
not in confidence.




XVI


However, it has seemed to be my fate, or my weakness, which we too
often confuse with fate, to vacillate between an interest in letters
and an interest in politics, and after that year, whose days and nights
were almost wholly given to studying law, I was admitted to the bar,
and thereupon felt qualified to go out on the stump in the campaign
that autumn and speak in behalf of the Democratic ticket. It was fun to
drive out over Sangamon County in those soft autumn evenings, over the
soft roads,--though if it rained they became too soft,--and to speak
in schoolhouses to the little audiences of farmers, or of miners, on
the iniquities of the tariff. If we had been a little more devoted to
principle, perhaps, than we were to party, we might better have spoken
of the iniquities of that Democratic minority in the Senate which had
just completed its betrayal of us all and helped to perpetrate those
iniquities, but when you belong to a party you are presumed to adjust
yourself to what your representatives do, and to make the best of what
generally is a pretty bad bargain. The bargain of those senators had
been particularly bad, and so, instead of speaking in the tones of
righteous indignation, we had to adopt the milder accents of apology
and explanation, and it was difficult to explain to some of those
audiences. There was more or less heckling, and now and then impromptu
little debates, and sometimes when the meeting was done, and we started
on the long ride back to town, we would find that the nuts had been
removed from the axles of our carriage-wheels. Perhaps that argument
was as good as any we had made, and it could not matter much anyway,
since partizan speeches never convince anybody, and if they could,
if they could do anything but deepen and intensify prejudice, whole
batteries of the world’s best orators in that year could not have
overcome the vicious effects of that high betrayal, even though they
had been led to the charge by Phocion and Demosthenes.

I suppose no greater moral wrong was ever committed in America. It
had been bad enough that a policy of favoritism and advantage which
appealed to so many because of the good luck of its reassuring name,
had endured so long, as a sort of necessity in the development of a new
continent; it had been bad enough that labor had first been lied to and
then subjugated by the lie, that women had been driven into mills, and
children had been fed to the Moloch of the machines, and that on these
sacrifices there had been reared in America an insolent plutocracy with
the ideals of a gambler and the manners of a wine-agent. But when the
workingmen had learned at last that the system did not “protect” them,
and when thousands of young men in the land, filled with the idealism
of youth, had recognized the lie and the hypocrisy, and hated them with
a fine moral abhorrence, and had turned to the Democratic party and
trusted it to redeem its promise to reform this evil, and had put it in
power in the nation, only to have its leaders in the Senate betray them
with the brutal cynicism such a cause as theirs demands, then there was
committed a deed little short of dastardly. If that seems too strong
a word, the deed was surely contemptible, and base enough to fill
anyone with despair of the party and of the party system as it had been
developed in America, though it has been understood by only two men
so far as I know--M. Ostrogorski and Golden Rule Jones. It was enough
to disgust anyone with politics altogether, and to forswear them and
parties, too, although I never quite understood the philosophy of the
attitude until, a few years later, Golden Rule Jones made it clear. He
made many things clear, for he dropped the plummet of his original mind
down, down, down, more profoundly into fundamental life than anyone I
can think of.

To me, in those days, the tariff question had seemed entirely
fundamental. I used to think that if we could but have civil-service
reform, and tariff for revenue only, the world would go very well.
The tariff question is not considered fundamental in these days, of
course, so fast and so far past the Mugwumps has the world run, though
everybody realizes its evil, and knows, or should know, that the notion
of privilege on which tariffs are founded is quite fundamentally wrong,
and every political party promises to reduce its rates, or revise them,
or at least to take some measures against the lie.

The Democratic party, to be sure, redeemed itself later under the
splendid leadership of President Wilson, but at that time, while we
recognized the evil of the theory, we seemed to have sunk into a
sordid acquiescence in the fact; everybody thought the tariff wrong,
but nobody wished to have it done away with so long as there was a
chance, to speak in modern American, for him to get in on the graft.
The word “graft” was unknown in those days, by all save those thieves
in whose argot it was found and devoted to its present general use in
the vocabulary. I suppose it is in the dictionary by this time. In any
event, it is not strange that the word should have become so current,
since for a while we made a national institution of the very thing it
connotes.

There was, however, then and always, the labor question, and we were
beginning to discover that that is fundamental, perhaps the one great
fundamental,--aside from the complication of evil and good that is
inherent and implicit in humanity itself,--since the burning question
is and always will be how the work of the world is to be got done, and,
what is a much more embarrassing problem, who is to do it. Many of the
men who had been doing that work, or the heaviest of it, were striking
in Illinois in those years.

The shots the Pinkertons had fired at Homestead echoed in the state;
Senator Palmer had made a great speech about it in the Senate; and
perhaps the tariff had something to do with that, since tariffs on
steel have not been unknown. But there were shots fired nearer home,
first in the strike among the men who were digging the drainage canal,
then among the miners in the soft coal fields of the state, then the
strike in the model town of Pullman, and the great railroad strike that
grew out of it.

They called it the Debs Rebellion, and for a while it assumed some of
the proportions of a rebellion, or at least it frightened many people
in Illinois as much as a rebellion might have done. We were in the
midst of all its alarms during that whole spring and summer, and down
in the adjutant-general’s office at the State House there was the stir
almost of war itself, with troops being ordered here and there about
the state, and the Governor harried and worried by a situation that
presented to him the abhorrent necessity of using armed force. I was
reading over the other day the report made to the War Department by
my friend Major Jewett Baker, then a lieutenant in the Twelfth U. S.
Infantry, detailed with the National Guard of Illinois; and in his
clear and excellent account of all those confused events the scenes of
those times came back: the long lines of idle freight cars, charred
by incendiary flames; the little groups of men standing about wearing
the white ribbons of the strike sympathizers, and the colonel of the
regular army, in his cups at his club, who wished he might order a
whole regiment to shoot them, “each man to take aim at a dirty white
ribbon”; the regulars encamped on the lake front, their sentinels
pacing their posts at the quickstep in the rain; and then that morning
conference in the mayor’s office in Chicago, at which I was permitted
to look on--what an interesting life it is to look on at!--when there
appeared Eugene V. Debs, tall, lithe, nervous, leader of the strikers,
his hair, what there was of it, sandy, but his head mostly bald, his
eyes flashing, his mouth ready to smile, soon to go to Woodstock Jail,
to emerge a Socialist, and become the leader of that party.

Major Baker’s report shows, indirectly and by inference, that much of
the criticism which the Governor endured was not justified, since he
turned out all his troops as fast as local authorities asked for them.
At any rate, he acted according to his democratic principles and to his
conception of his duty. His principles were in a sense different from
those of President Cleveland, with whom he disagreed in that notable
instance when the President in his vigorous, practical way sent federal
troops into Chicago; the Governor protested, as one of his predecessors
in the governor’s office, Senator Palmer, had protested when President
Grant sent federal troops under Phil Sheridan into Chicago at the time
of the great fire. Almost everybody who had any way of making his voice
heard sided with President Cleveland, and the end of the strike was
accredited to him. Doubtless the grim presence of those regular troops
did overawe the hoodlums who had taken advantage of the strike to
create disorder, but if the credit must go to armed force, the report
by Major, or, as he was in those days, Lieutenant, Baker shows that
that little company of the Illinois National Guard which ruthlessly
fired into the mob at Loomis Street one night virtually ended the
disorder.

Perhaps Governor Altgeld was willing to forego any “credit” for an act,
which, however necessary to the preservation of order, demanded so many
lives. I do not know as to that, but I do recall the expression which
clouded his face that afternoon we arrived at Lemont, during the strike
at the drainage canal. It occurred a year before the railway strike,
and the Governor had gone to Lemont himself to make an investigation.
He had asked Lieutenant Baker and me to go with him, and when we got
off the train at Lemont, on the afternoon of a cheerless day, the
crowds were standing aimlessly about, watching with a sullen curiosity
the arrival of the militia. The soldiers were just then going into
camp on the level rocks by a bridge across the canal and the Desplaines
River--the bridge, according to the military scientists, was, I
believe, considered, for some mysterious reason, to be a strategic
point.

The picture was one for the brush of Remington--those young blue-clad
soldiers (it was before the days of our imperialism, and of the khaki
our soldiers now imitate the British in wearing)--and Baker and I stood
and gazed at it a moment, affected by the fascination there always is
in the superficial military spectacle; and then, suddenly, we were
aware that there was another and more dramatic point of interest,
where a group stood about the body of a workman who had been shot in
the riots of that morning. He was a foreigner, the clothes he wore
doubtless those he had had on when he passed under the Statue of
Liberty, coming to this land with what hopes of freedom in his breast
no one can ever know. The wife who had come with him was on her knees
beside him, rocking back and forth in her grief, dumb as to any words
in a strange land whose tongue she could not speak or understand.

The reporters from the Chicago newspapers were there, and among them
Eddie Bernard, an old Whitechapeler, who told us that the man had
reached Lemont only a few days before, and had been happy in the job
he had so promptly found in the new land of promise. And now, there he
lay, shot dead. Bernard looked a moment, and then in the irony of a
single phrase he expressed the whole drama as he said:

“The land of the free and the home of the brave!”

That was fundamental, anyhow, and politics were not going deeply into
the question, except as such men as Altgeld did so, and even they were
criticized sharply for attempting it. And one might well be disgusted
with politics, then and always, and think of something that has the
consolation of literature. The traffic of politicians, as Mr. George
Moore somewhere says, is with the things of this world, while art is
concerned with the dreams, the visions and the aspirations of a world
beyond this. Though literature must some day in this land concern
itself with that very question of labor, since it is with fundamental
life that art must deal, and be true in its dealing.




XVII


Politics in those days--and not alone in those days either--were mean,
and while I do not intend to say that this meanness bowed me with
despair, it did fill me with disgust, and made the whole business
utterly distasteful. Politics were almost wholly personal, there was
then no conception of them as related to social life. An awakening was
coming, to be sure, and the signs were then apparent, even if but few
saw them. They were to most quite dim; but there were here and there in
the land dreamers of a sort, who had caught a new vision. The feeling
of it, the emotion, was to find expression in Mr. Bryan’s great
campaign in 1896; but there was then in Chicago a little group, men who
had read Henry George, or, without reading him, had looked out on life
intelligently and gained a concept of it, or perhaps had merely felt
in themselves the stirrings of a new social instinct, and these saw,
or thought they saw, the way to a better social order. They could not
in those days gain so patient a hearing for their views as they have
since, if any hearing they have had may after all be called patient;
they were not so very patient themselves, perhaps, as men are quite apt
not to be when they think they see as clearly as though a perpetual
lightning blazed in the sky exactly what is the matter with the world,
and have a simple formula, which, were it but tried, would instantly
and infallibly make everything all right.

But these men were not in politics; some of them were too impractical
ever to be, and the only man in politics who understood them at all
was Altgeld. Generally, the moral atmosphere of politics was foul and
heavy with the feculence of all the debauchery that is inseparable
from privilege. The personnel of politics was generally low; and in
city councils and state legislatures there was a cynical contempt of
all the finer sentiments. It was not alone that provincialism and
philistinism which stand so obdurately and with such bovine stupidity
in the way of progress; there was a positive scorn of the virtues,
and the alliance between the lobbyists and the lawyers of the great
corporation interests on the one hand, and the managers of both the
great political parties on the other, was a fact, the worst feature of
which was that no one seemed to care, or if a few did care, they did
not know what to do about it. It was a joke among the newspaper men,
who had little respect for the men who filled the positions of power
and responsibility; the wonder was, indeed, after such association,
that they had any respect left for anything in the world. Only the
other day, reading Walt Whitman’s terrific arraignment of the powers
that were in control of the government of the nation in Buchanan’s
time, his awful catalogue of the sorts of men who composed the
directorate of affairs,--it may be read in his prose works by those
who wish,--I was struck by the similarity in this respect of that time
with that which immediately preceded the newer and better time of the
moral awakening in America. Altgeld was one of the forerunners of this
time; and, in accordance with the universal law of human nature, it was
his fate to be misunderstood and ridiculed and hated, even by many in
his own party. He was far in the van in most ways, so far that it was
impossible for his own party to follow him. It did not follow him in
his opposition to a bill which was passed in the General Assembly to
permit of the consolidation of gas companies in Chicago; the machines
of the two parties were working well together in the legislature--in
one of those bipartizan alliances which were not to be understood until
many years later, and even then not to be understood so very clearly,
since most of our cities have been governed since by such alliances,
in the interest of similar gas companies and other public utility
corporations--and when the Governor vetoed their evil measure, this
same bipartizan machine sought to pass it over his veto, and none was
more active in the effort than were the leaders of his own party in the
House.

The supreme effort was made on the last night of the session, amidst
one of those riots which mark the dissolution of our deliberative
legislative bodies. The lobbyists for the measure were quite shameless
that night, as they were on most nights, no doubt; almost as shameless
as the legislators themselves. The House was in its shirt-sleeves; and
there was the rude horse-play of country bumpkins; paper wads were
flying, now and then some member sent hurtling through the hot air
his file of printed legislative bills, and all the while there was
that confusion of sound, laughter, and oaths and snatches of song,
a sort of bedlam, in which laws were being enacted--laws that must
be respected and even revered, because of their sacred origin. The
leaders were serious, but worried; the expressions of their drawn,
tense, nervous faces were unhappy in suspicion and fear, and, perhaps,
because of uneasy consciences. The speaker sat above them, pale and
haggard, rapping his splintered sounding-board with a broken gavel,
rapping persistently and futilely. And as the time drew near when the
gas bill was to come on for consideration, the nervous tension was
intensified, and evil hung almost palpably in the hot, close air of
that chamber. Those who have had experience of legislative bodies, and
have by practice learned something of political aëroscopy, can always
tell when “something is coming off”; political correspondents have
cultivated the sense, and that night they could have divined nothing
good or pure or beautiful in that chamber (where the portraits of
Lincoln and of Douglas hung), unless it were the mellow music, now and
then, of the glass prisms of the chandeliers hanging high from the
garish ceiling, as they tinkled and chimed whenever some little breeze
wandered in from the June night.

And yet there was beauty there, moral beauty, as there ever is
somewhere in man. Out on the edge of that bedlam, standing under the
gallery on the Democratic side, near the cloak-room, stood a tall, lank
man. You would have known him at once, anywhere, as an Egyptian, as we
called those who had come from the Illinois land south of the old O. &
M. railroad. He was uncouth in appearance; he wore drab, ill-fitting
clothes, and at his wrinkled throat there was no collar. He was a
member, sent there from some rural district far down in the southern
end of the state; and all through the session he had been silent,
taking no part, except to vote, and to vote, on most occasions, with
his party, which, in those days, was the whole duty of man. This night
would see the end of his political career, if his brief experience
in an obscure position could be called a career, and he stood there,
silently looking on, plucking now and then at his chin, his long,
wrinkled face brown and solemn and inscrutable.

The old Egyptian stood there while the long roll was being called, and
the crisis approached, and the nervous tension was a keen pain. And
suddenly one of the gas lobbyists went up to him, there on the verge
of the House, and began to talk with him. I had the story a good while
afterwards from one of the whips, who, it seemed, knew all that had
gone on that night. The lobbyist of course knew about the man, knew
especially about his necessities, as lobbyists do; and he began to
talk to the old fellow about them--about his poverty and his children,
and he used the old argument which has been employed so long and so
successfully with the rural members of all our legislatures, and has
been the source of so much evil in our city governments, that is, the
argument that the bill concerned only Chicago, and that the folks down
home would neither know nor care how he voted on it, and then--how
much two thousand dollars would mean to him. As the lobbyist talked,
there were various eyes that looked at him, waiting for a sign; they
needed only a few votes then, and the roll-call was being delayed by
one pretense and another, and the clock on the wall, inexorably ticking
toward the hour of that legislature’s dissolution, was turned back. The
old fellow listened and stroked his chin, and then presently, when the
lobbyist had done, he turned his old blue eyes on him and said:

“I reckon you’re right: I’m poor, and I’ve got a big family. And you’re
right, too, when you say my people won’t know nor care: they won’t;
they don’t know nor care a damn; they won’t send me back here, of
course. And God knows what’s to come of my wife and my children; I am
going home to them to-morrow and on Monday I’m going to hunt me a job
in the harvest-field; I reckon I’ll die in the poorhouse. Yes, I’m
going home--but”--he stopped and looked the lobbyist in the eye--“I’m
going home an honest man.”

My friend the whip told me the story as a curious and somewhat
confusing flaw in his theory that every man is for sale,--“most of
them damned cheap,” he said,--and he thought it might make a plot for
a story; like many men I have known he was incorrigibly romantic, and
was always giving me plots for stories. Well, they failed to pass the
bill over the Governor’s veto, and it was not long until another story
was pretty well known in Illinois, about that Governor who that night
was sitting up over in the executive mansion, awaiting the action of
the general assembly. The story was that a large quantity of the bonds
of the gas company had been placed at his disposal in a security vault
in Chicago, in a box to which a man was to deliver him the key; all he
had to do was to go take the bonds--and permit the bill to become a
law. His answer, of course, was the veto--an offense as unpardonable
as the pardoning of the anarchists; and no doubt many such offenses
against the invisible power in the land were more potent in bringing
down on his head that awful hatred than his mercy had been--though this
was made to serve as reason for the hatred. Privilege, of course, hates
mercy, too.

The old Egyptian went back home, and I have always hoped that he found
a better job than he went to seek in the harvest-fields, and that he
did not die at last to the poorhouse; but he was never heard of more,
and it was not long until the Governor was driven from his office
amid the hoots and jeers and the hissing of a venomous hatred such as
nothing but political rancor knows, unless it be religious rancor. Yes,
politics had got pretty low in those days, and its utter meanness,
gradually revealed, was enough to cause one to despair of his country
and his kind. Perhaps the old Egyptian in the legislature and the
idealist in the governor’s chair should have been enough to keep one
from despairing altogether, though one honest old peasant cannot save a
legislature any more than one swallow can make a summer. I do not mean
to say that he was the only honest man in the legislature: there were
many others, of course, but partizan politics prevented their honesty
from being of much avail; or, at any rate, they did not control events.
With the measurable advance in thought since that time, and the general
progress of the species, we know now that men do not control events
half so much as events control men; we do not know exactly what it is
that does control men--that is, those of us who are not Socialists do
not know.

Altgeld, at any rate, was disgusted with politics, as well he might
have been, since they wrecked his fortune and broke his heart. And it
was with relief, I know, that he said that morning,--almost the last
he passed in the governor’s chair,--as he and I were going up the long
walk to the State House steps:

“Well, we’re rid of this, anyway.”




XVIII


That peculiar form of human activity, or inactivity, known as getting a
law practice, has been so abundantly treated on the printed page that
I have not the temerity to add to the literature on the interesting
subject. The experience is never dramatic, even if it is sometimes
tragic, and it is so often tragic that there has seemed no other
recourse for mankind than, by one of those tacit understandings on
which our race gets through life, to view it as a comedy. It is no
comedy, of course, to the chief actor, who is sustained only by his
dreams, his illusions, and his ideals, and he may count himself
successful perhaps, if, when he has lost his illusions, he can retain
at least some of his ideals, though the law is too apt to strip him
of both. However that may be, in my own experience in that sort there
was an incident which made its peculiar impressions; indeed, there
were several such incidents, but the one which I have in mind involves
the perhaps commonplace story of Maria R----, which ran like a serial
during those trying years.

I had intended to take up the practice of law in Chicago; I was quite
certain that there I should set up my little enterprise, and this
self-same certainty is perhaps the reason why I found myself back in
Toledo, in a lonely little office in one of the new office buildings;
sky-scrapers they were called in the new sense of metropolitan life
that then began to pervade the town; they were not so very high, but
they seemed high enough to scrape the low skies which arch so many
of the grey days in the lake region. It was as long ago, I believe,
as the time of Pythagoras that the law of the certain uncertainty of
certainty was deduced for the humbling of human pride, and when my
certainties with regard to Chicago proved all to be broken reeds,
there were more gray days in that region of the intemperate zone than
the meteorological records show. The little law office had a portrait
of William Dean Howells on its walls, and in time the portraits of
other writers, differing from those other law offices which prefer to
be adorned with pictures of Chief Justice Marshall--a strong man, of
course, who wrote some strong fiction, too, in his day--and of Hamilton
and of Jefferson, indicating either a catholicity or a confusion of
principle on the part of the occupying proprietor, of which usually he
is not himself aware. There were a few law-books, too, and on the desk
a little digest of the law of evidence as affected by the decisions
of the Ohio courts. I had the noble intention of mastering it, but
I did not read in it very much, since for a long while there was no
one to pay me for doing so, and I spent most of my hours at my desk
over a manuscript of “The 13th District,” a novel of politics I was
then writing, looking up now and then and gazing out of the window at
the blank rear walls of certain brick buildings which made a dreary
prospect, even if one of them did bear, as I well remember, the bright
and reassuring legend, “Money to Loan at 6 per cent.”

There were not many interruptions at first, but after a while, when I
had been appointed as attorney to a humane society, there were times
when I had to lay my manuscripts aside. I felt it to be, in a way, my
duty to long for such interruptions, but they usually came just at
those times when I was most absorbed in my manuscript, so that their
welcome, while affectedly polite, was not wholly from the heart. One
of these intrusions resulted in a long trial before a justice of the
peace; it was a case that grew out of a neighborhood quarrel, and all
the inhabitants of the _locus in quo_ were subpœnaed as witnesses.
Such a case of course always affords an opportunity to study human
nature; but this one, too, had the effect ultimately of bringing in
many clients--and, as Altgeld had said, by way of advice to me, got
people in the habit of coming to my office. Those witnesses acquired
that habit, and since human nature seemed to run pretty high in that
neighborhood most of the time, they got into a good deal of trouble;
they were most of them so poor that they seldom got into anything else,
unless it were the jail or the workhouse, and some of them were always
ready to help send others of them to those places. Out of the long file
of poor miserable creatures there emerged one day that Maria R---- of
whom I spoke. She was a buxom young German emigrant, not long over from
Pomerania, and her fair skin and yellow hair, and a certain manner she
had, marked her out from all the rest. She came with her children one
morning to complain of her husband’s neglect of them; and to her, as to
the whole body of society which thinks no more deeply than she did,
it seemed the necessary, proper, and even indispensable thing to put
Rheinhold--that was her husband’s name--in jail (You should have heard
her speak the name Rheinhold, with that delicious note in which she
_grasséyéd_ her r’s.) There she sat, on the little chair by the window,
with her stupidly staring boy and girl at her knees, but in her arms
the brightest, prettiest, flaxen-haired baby in the world, a little elf
who was always smiling, and picking at her mother’s nose or cheeks with
her fat little fingers, and when she smiled, her mother smiled, too; it
was the only time she ever did.

Rheinhold of course drank; he “mistreated” his children--that is, he
did not buy them food. And since the Humane Society was organized and
maintained for the explicit purpose of forcing people to be humane,
even though it had to be inhumane to accomplish its purpose, the duty
of its attorney was clear.

Its attorney just then felt in himself a rising indignation, moral of
course, yet very much like a vulgar anger. To look at those children,
especially at that baby of which Maria was so fond, much fonder it
was plain to be seen than of the other two, and to think of a man
not providing for them, was to have a rage against him, the rage
which society, so remorselessly moral in the mass, bears against all
offenders--the rage a good prosecutor must keep alive and flaming in
his breast if he would nerve himself to his task and earn his fees and
society’s gratitude. And whom does society reward so lavishly as her
prosecutors?

However, that is not the strain I would adopt just now. I felt that
very rage in myself at that moment, and straightway went and had
Rheinhold arrested and haled before a judge in the Municipal Court,
charged with the crime of neglecting his children. I can remember
his wild and bewildered look as he was arraigned that morning. The
information was read to him, and he moved his head in such instant
acquiescence that the judge, looking down from his bench, asked him if
he wished to plead guilty, and he said “Yes.” It seemed then that the
case was to be quite easily disposed of, and the prosecutor might feel
gratified by this instant success of his work; and yet Rheinhold stood
there so confused, so frightened, with the court-room loungers looking
on, that I said:

“He doesn’t understand a word of all you are saying.”

And so the judge entered a plea of “not guilty.”

I knew a young lawyer with rather large leisure, and I asked him to
defend Rheinhold. He was glad to do so, and we empaneled a jury and
went at what Professor Wigmore calls the “high-class sport.” We became
desperately interested of course, and for days wrangled according to
the rules of the game over the liberty of the bewildered little German
who scarcely knew what it was all about. Now and then he made some
wild, inarticulate protest, but was of course promptly silenced by his
own lawyer, or by the judge, or by the rules of evidence, which could
be invoked--with a deep sense of satisfaction when the court ruled
your way--to prevent him from telling something he had on his mind,
something that to him seemed entirely exculpatory, something that would
make the whole clouded situation clear if it could only find its way to
the light and to the knowledge of mankind.

There was a witness against him, a tall, slender young German
shoemaker, and it was against him that Rheinhold’s outcries were
directed. It was not clear just what he was trying to say, and there
was small disposition to help him make it clear. His lawyer indeed
seemed embarrassed, as though in making his incoherent interruptions
Rheinhold were committing a _contretemps_; he must wait for his turn to
testify, that all might be done in order and according to the ancient
rules and precedents, and, in a word, as it should be done. Under the
rules of evidence, of course, Rheinhold could not be allowed to express
his opinion of the shoemaker; that was not permissible. The court could
not be concerned with the passions of the human heart; this man before
the court had a family, and he had neglected to provide food for it,
and for such a condition it was written and printed in a book that
the appropriate remedy was a certain number of days or months in the
workhouse.

And so while Rheinhold silently and philosophically acquiesced, we
tried him during one whole day, we argued nearly all the next day to
the jury, and the jury stayed out all that night and in the morning
returned a verdict of guilty. And Rheinhold was sent to the workhouse
for nine months.




XIX


It was regarded as a triumph for the Humane Society,--the newspapers
had printed accounts of the trial,--but it was a victory of which I
felt pretty much ashamed; it all seemed so useless, so absurd, so
barbarous, when you came to think of it, and what good it had done
Maria, or anyone, it was difficult to determine. And so, before very
long, I went to the workhouse board and had Rheinhold paroled, and he
disappeared, vanished toward the West, and was never heard of more.

Meanwhile Maria lived on in her little house as best she could, and
with what assistance we could provide her. The Humane Society helped a
little, and my wife made some clothes for the baby, and a good-natured
doctor in the neighborhood attended them when they were sick, which was
a good deal of the time; and Maria seemed happy enough and contented,
relying with such entire confidence on her friends that one cold night
she sent for me in great urgency, and when I arrived she pointed to
the stove, which was smoking and not doing its work in a satisfactory
manner at all. I mended it and got the fire going, and they managed to
survive the winter; and when spring came Maria appeared at the office
and wished to apply to the courts for a divorce. It seemed as good a
thing to do as any, and the evidence of Rheinhold’s cruel neglect was
by this time so conclusive that it was not much trouble to obtain a
decree, especially as the case came before a delightful old bachelor
judge who felt that if people were not divorced they ought to be; and
after listening to two of the five or six witnesses I had subpœnaed he
granted Maria her freedom.

And the next day she got married again. The bridegroom was that very
shoemaker who had testified in Rheinhold’s trial; he lived not far from
Maria’s late residence, and the happy event, as I learned then, was the
culmination of a romance which had disturbed Rheinhold to such a degree
that he had preferred to be anywhere rather than at home; and it seemed
now--it was now indeed quite clear--that what he had been trying to
explain at the time of the trial was that his fate was involved in the
eternal triangle.

I do not know where Rheinhold is now; as I said, he was never heard
of more, but I should like to present my apologies to him and to
inform him that as a result of that expedition into the jungle of the
law in search of justice I discovered that whatever other men might
do, I could never again prosecute anyone for anything; and I never
did. And I think that most of the attempts men make to do justice in
their criminal courts are about as mistaken, about as absurd, about
as ridiculous, as that solemn and supremely silly effort we made to
deal with such a human complication by means of calf-bound law-books,
and wrangling lawyers, and twelve stupid jurors ranged behind twelve
spittoons. The whole experience revealed to me the beauty and the
truth in that wise passage in Mr. Howells’s charming book, “A Boy’s
Town”:

“In fact, it seems best to be very careful how we try to do justice in
this world, and mostly to leave retribution of all kinds to God, who
really knows about things; and content ourselves as much as possible
with mercy, whose mistakes are not so irreparable.”

That passage, I think, contains a whole and entirely adequate
philosophy of life; but I suppose that those who shake their heads at
such heresies will be equally shocked to learn that Maria’s second
venture proved to be a remarkable success.

The shoemaker was a frugal chap,--the evidence discloses, I think, that
he had been an unusually frugal lover,--and he had saved some money,
which, it seems, he was determined not to spend on his fair one until
he could develop some legal claim to her, but he treated her handsomely
then, according to his taste and ability. He bought a house in another
and better part of town, and he furnished it in a way that dazzled
the eyes of those children who had been accustomed to bare floors and
had never known the glories of golden oak and blue and yellow and red
plush, ingrain carpets, and chenille hangings; and he clothed them all
and sent them to school, and finally they all took his name, and, I
think, forgot poor Rheinhold altogether. And so, in their new-found
prosperity, they vanished out of my sight, and I heard of them no more
for years. Then one day Maria’s little daughter, grown into a tall
young girl by that time, came to tell me that her mother was dead.
Maria had started down town with her husband, on Christmas Eve, to buy
the gifts for her children, and in the heavy snow that was falling a
defective sidewalk was hidden, and Maria was thrown to the ground and
so hurt that she died. Her last words to her daughter had been, so the
girl said, “See Mr. Whitlock; he’ll do what should be done.” Her heirs
had a clear case against the city, but I had just been elected mayor
that autumn and could not prosecute such a claim. Another lawyer did
so, and got damages for the children, and even for the husband, and
with these funds in a trust company’s keeping the shoemaker educated
all the children. And he wore about his hat the thickest hand of heavy
crêpe that I ever saw.

It seemed to annoy, and in some cases even to anger, those whom I
told of my resolution not to prosecute anyone any more. They would
argue about it with me as if it made some real difference to them; if
every lawyer and every man were so to decide, they said, who was to
proceed against the criminals, who was to do the work of purifying and
regenerating society? It has always been, of course, a most interesting
and vital question as to who is to do the dirty work of all kinds in
this world; but their apprehensions, as I could assure them, were all
unfounded, since there are always plenty of lawyers, and always plenty
of them who are not only willing but anxious to act as prosecutors, and
to put into their work that energy and enthusiasm which the schools of
efficiency urge upon the youth of the land, and to prosecute with a
ferocity that could be no more intense if they had suffered some injury
in their own persons from the accused. And there are even men who are
willing, for the most meager salaries, to act as guards and wardens
in prisons, and to do all manner of things, even to commit crimes, or
at least moral wrongs, in order to put men into prison and keep them
there, unless they can kill them, and there are plenty who are willing
to do that, if only society provides them with a rope or a wire to do
it with.




XX


There was, however, in Toledo one man who could sympathize with my
attitude; and that was a man whose determination to accept literally
and to try to practice the fundamental philosophy of Christianity
had so startled and confounded the Christians everywhere that he at
once became famous throughout Christendom as “Golden Rule Jones.” I
had known of him only as the eccentric mayor of our city, and nearly
everyone whom I had met since my advent in Toledo spoke of him only
to say something disparaging of him. The most charitable thing they
said was that he was crazy. All the newspapers were against him,
and all the preachers. My own opinion, of course, could have been
of no consequence, but I had learned in the case of Altgeld that
almost universal condemnation of a man is to be examined before it is
given entire credit. I do not mean to say that there was universal
condemnation of Golden Rule Jones in Toledo in those days: it was
simply that the institutional voices of society, the press and the
pulpit, were thundering in condemnation of him. When the people came to
vote for his reëlection his majorities were overwhelming, so that he
used to say that everybody was against him but the people. But that is
another story.

In those days I had not met him. I might have called at his office, to
be sure, but I did not care to add to his burdens. One day, suddenly,
as I was working on a story in my office, in he stepped with a
startling, abrupt manner, wheeled a chair up to my desk, and sat down.
He was a big Welshman with a sandy complexion and great hands that
had worked hard in their time, and he had an eye that looked right
into the center of your skull. He wore, and all the time he was in the
room continued to wear, a large cream-colored slouch hat, and he had
on the flowing cravat which for some inexplicable reason artists and
social reformers wear; their affinity being due, no doubt, to the fact
that the reformer must be an artist of a sort, else he could not dream
his dreams. I was relieved, however, to find that Jones wore his hair
clipped short, and there was still about him that practical air of the
very practical business man he had been before he became mayor. He had
been such a practical business man that he was worth half a million, a
fairly good fortune for our town; but he had not been in office very
long before all the business men were down on him, and saying that what
the town needed was a business man for mayor, a statement that was
destined to ring in my ears for a good many years. They disliked him of
course because he would not do just what they told him to,--that being
the meaning and purpose of a business man for mayor,--but insisted that
there were certain other people in the city who were entitled to some
of his service and consideration--namely, the working people and the
poor. The politicians and the preachers objected to him on the same
grounds: the unpardonable sin being to express in any but a purely
ideal and sentimental form sympathy for the workers or the poor. It
seemed to be particularly exasperating that he was doing all this in
the name of the Golden Rule, which was for the Sunday-school; and they
even went so far as to bring to town another Sam Jones, the Reverend
Sam Jones, to conduct a “revival” and to defeat the Honorable Sam
Jones. The Reverend Sam Jones had big meetings, and said many clever
things, and many true ones, the truest among them being his epigram,
“I am for the Golden Rule myself, up to a certain point, and then I
want to take the shotgun and the club.” I think that expression marked
the difference between him and our Sam Jones, in whose philosophy
there was no place at all for the shotgun or the club. The preachers
were complaining that Mayor Jones was not using shotguns, or at least
clubs, on the “bad” people in the town; I suppose that since their own
persuasions had in a measure failed, they felt that the Mayor with such
instruments might have made the “bad” people look as if they had been
converted anyway.

It was when he was undergoing such criticism as this that he came to
see me, to ask me to speak at Golden Rule Park. This was a bit of green
grass next to his factory; he had dedicated it to the people’s use,
and there under a large willow-tree, on Sunday afternoons, he used to
speak to hundreds. There was a little piano which two men could carry,
and with that on the platform to play the accompaniments the people
used to sing songs that Jones had written--some of them of real beauty,
and breathing the spirit of poetry, if they were not always quite in
its form. In the winter these meetings were held in Golden Rule Hall,
a large room that served very well as an auditorium, in his factory
hard by. On the walls of Golden Rule Hall was the original tin sign
he had hung up in his factory as the only rule to be known there,
“Therefore whatsoever things ye would that men should do to you, do ye
even so to them.” In the course of time every reformer, every radical,
in the country had spoken in that hall or under that willow-tree,
and the place developed an atmosphere that was immensely impressive.
The hall had the portraits of many liberal leaders and humanitarians
on its walls, and a number of paintings; and in connection with the
settlement which Jones established across the street the institution
came to be, as a reporter wrote one day in his newspaper, the center of
intelligence in Toledo.

Well then, on that morning when first he called, Jones said to me:

“I want you to come out and speak.”

“On what subject?” I asked.

“There’s only one subject,” he said,--“life.” And his face was radiant
with a really beautiful smile, warmed with his rich humor. I began to
say that I would prepare something, but he would not let me finish my
sentence.

“Prepare!” he exclaimed. “Why prepare? Just speak what’s in your heart.”

He was always like that. Once, a good while after, in one of his
campaigns, he called me on the telephone one evening just at dinner
time, and said:

“I want you to go to Ironville and speak to-night.”

I was tired, and, as I dislike to confess, somewhat reluctant,--I had
always to battle so for a little time to write,--so that I hesitated,
asked questions, told him, as usual, that I had no speech prepared.

“But you know it is written,” he said, “that ‘in that hour it shall be
given you what ye shall say.’”

I could assure him that the prophecy had somewhat failed in my case,
and that what was given me to say was not always worth listening to
when it was said; and then I inquired:

“What kind of crowd will be there?”

“Oh, a good crowd!” he said.

“But what kind of people?”

“What kind of people?” he asked in a tone of great and genuine
surprise. “What kind of people? Why, there’s only one kind of
people--just people, just folks.”

I went of course, and I went as well to Golden Rule Park and to Golden
Rule Hall, and there was never such a school for public speaking as
that crowded park afforded, with street cars grinding and scraping by
one side of it and children laughing at their play on the swings and
poles which Jones had put there for them; or else standing below the
speaker and looking curiously up into his face, and filling him with
the fear of treading any moment on their little fingers which, as they
clung to the edge, made a border all along the front of the platform.
And for a year or so after his death I spoke there every Sunday: we
were trying so hard to keep his great work alive.




XXI


It was our interest in the disowned, the outcast, the poor, and the
criminal that drew us first together; that and the fact that we are
gradually assuming the same attitude toward life. He was full of
Tolstoy at that time, and we could talk of the great Russian, and I
could introduce him to the other great Russians. He was then a little
past fifty, and had just made the astounding discovery that there was
such a thing as literature in the world: he had been so busy working
all his life that he had never had time to read, and the whole world of
letters burst upon his vision all suddenly, and the glorious prospect
fairly intoxicated him, so that he stood like stout Cortez, though not
so silent, upon a peak in Darien.

He was reading Mazzini also, and William Morris and Emerson, who
expressed his philosophy fully, or as fully as one man can express
anything for another, and it was not long before Jones discovered
an unusual facility for expressing himself, both with his voice and
with his pen. The letters he wrote to the men in his shops--putting
them in their pay-envelopes--are models of simplicity and sincerity,
which show a genuine culture and have that beauty which is the despair
of conscious art.[A] He had just learned of Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad
of Reading Gaol,” and he committed it to memory, or got it into his
memory somehow, so that he would recite stanzas of it to anyone. He
read Burns, too, with avidity, and I can see him now standing on the
platform in one of his meetings, snapping his fingers as he recited:

  A fig for those by law protected!
  Liberty’s a glorious feast!

But it was Walt Whitman whom he loved most, and his copy of “Leaves of
Grass” was underscored in heavy lines with a red pencil until nearly
every striking passage in the whole work had become a rubric. When
anything struck him, he would have to come and tell me of it; sometimes
he would not wait, but would call me up on the telephone and read it to
me. I remember that occasion when his voice, over the wire, said:

“Listen to this [and he read]:

  “The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair, redeeming sins past and to
    come,
  Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his
    brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery.”

Then he laughed, and his chuckle died away on the wire. That expressed
him; that was exactly what he would have done for a brother, exactly
what he did do for many a brother, since he regarded all men as his
brothers, and treated them as such if they would let him. He was always
going down to the city prisons, or to the workhouses, and talking to
the poor devils there, quite as if he were one of them, which indeed
he felt he was, and as all of us are, if we only knew it. And he was
working all the time to get them out of prison, and finally he and I
entered into a little compact by which he paid the expenses incident to
their trials--the fees for stenographers and that sort of thing--if I
would look after their cases. Hard as the work was, and sad as it was,
and grievously as my law partners complained of the time it took, and
of its probable effect on business (since no one wished to be known as
a criminal lawyer!), it did pay in the satisfaction there was in doing
a little to comfort and console--and, what was so much more, to compel
in one city, at least, a discussion of the grounds and the purpose of
our institutions. For instance, if some poor girl were arrested, and a
jury trial were demanded for her, and her case were given all the care
and attention it would have received had she been some wealthy person,
the police, when they found they could not convict, were apt to be a
little more careful of the liberties of individuals: they began to have
a little regard for human rights and for human life.

We completely broke up the old practice of arresting persons “on
suspicion” and holding them at the will and pleasure of the police
without any charge having been lodged against them; two or three trials
before juries, the members of which could very easily be made to see,
when it was pointed out to them a few times in the course of a three
days’ trial, that there is nothing more absurd than that policemen
should make criminals of people merely by suspecting them, and sending
them to prison on that sole account, wrought a change. It annoyed the
officials of course, because it interfered with their routine. It was
no doubt exasperating to be compelled to stay in court two or three
days and try some wretch according to the forms of law, just as if he
were somebody of importance and consequence in the world, when they
would so much rather have been out at the ball-game, or fishing, or
playing pinochle in the guard-room at police headquarters with the
detail that had been relieved. Jones managed to get himself fined for
contempt one day, and he immediately turned the incident to his own
advantage and made his point by drawing out his check-book with a
flourish, writing his check for the amount of his fine, and declaring
that this proved his contention that the only crime our civilization
punishes is the crime of being poor.

But he was most in his element when the police judge was absent, as
he was now and then. In that exigency the law gave Jones, as mayor,
the power to appoint the acting police judge; and when Jones did
not go down and sit as magistrate himself, he appointed me; and we
always found some reason or other for letting all the culprits go. The
foundations of society were shaken of course, and the editorials and
sermons were heavy with all the predictions of disaster; one might have
supposed that the whole wonderful and beautiful fabric of civilization
which man had been so long in rearing was to fall forever into the
awful abyss because a few miserable outcasts had not been put in
prison. But nothing happened after all; the poor _misérables_ were back
again in a few days, and made to resume their hopeless rounds through
the prison doors; but the policemen of Toledo had their clubs taken
away from them, and they became human, and learned to help people, and
not to hurt them if they could avoid it; and that police judge who once
fined Jones became in time one of the leaders in our city of the new
social movement that has marked the last decade in America.

I learned to know a good many people in that underworld, many of whom
were professed criminals, and there were some remarkable characters
among them. I learned that, just as Jones had said, they were all
people, just folks, and that they had so much more good than bad in
them, that if some way could be devised whereby they might have a
little better opportunity to develop the good, there was hope for all
of them. Of course, in any effort to help them,--and our efforts were
not always perhaps wholly wise,--we encountered that most formidable
and fundamental obstacle to prison reform, the desire in the human
breast for revenge, the savage hatred which is perhaps some obscure
instinct of protection against the anti-social members of society: it
stands forever in the way of all prison reform, and of ameliorations of
the lot of the poor. It is that which keeps the barbarity of capital
punishment alive in the world; it is that which makes every prison in
the land a hell, where from time to time the most revolting atrocities
are practiced. Out of those experiences, out of the contemplation of
the misery, the pathos, the hopelessness of the condition of those
victims, I wrote “The Turn of the Balance.” I was very careful of my
facts; I was purposely conservative, and, forgetting the advice of
Goethe, softened things down; as for instance, where I had known of
cases in which prisoners had been hung up in the bull-rings for thirty
days,--being lowered to the floor each night of course,--I put it
down as eight days, and so on. And the wise and virtuous judges and
the preachers and the respectable people all said it was untrue, that
such things could not be. Since then there have been investigations of
prisons in most of the states, with revelations of conditions far worse
than any I tried to portray. And such things have gone on, and are
going on to-day; but nobody cares.




XXII


And yet somebody after all did care about all those miserable souls
who are immured in the terrible prisons which society maintains as
monuments to the strange and implacable hatred in the breast of
mankind; perhaps, in the last chapter of these vagrant memories, I
allowed to creep into my utterance some of the old bitterness which
now and then would taint our efforts, do what we might. And that is
not at all the note I would adopt, though it used at times to be very
difficult not to do so; one cannot, day after day, beat against the old
and solid and impregnable wall of human institutions without becoming
sore and sick in one’s soul.

And there is no institution which society so cherishes as she does
her penal institutions, and most sacrosanct of these are the ax, the
guillotine, the garrote, the gibbet, the electric chair. We tried
at each session of the legislature to secure the passage of a bill
abolishing capital punishment, but the good people, those who felt that
they held in their keeping the morals of the state, always opposed
it and defeated it. Beloved and sacred institution! No wonder the
ship-wrecked sailor, cast upon an unknown shore, on looking up and
beholding a gallows, fell on his knees and said; “Thank God, I’m in a
Christian land!”

Travelers visit prisons and places of execution, those historic spots
where humanity made red blots on its pathway in the notion that it was
doing justice, and always they sigh and shake their heads, beholding
in those events only a supreme folly and a supreme cruelty.

All the executions, all the imprisonments of the past are seen to
have been mistakes made by savages; there is not one for which to-day
a word is uttered in excuse. All the Golgothas of the world have
become Calvaries, where men go in pity and in tears in the hope that
their regret may somehow work a retroactive expiation of the guilt of
their cruel ancestors--and they rise from their knees and go forth
and acquiesce in brutalities that are to-day different only in the
slightest of degrees from those they bemoan.

And so all the other executions of death sentences, on subjects less
distinguished, with no glimmer of the halo of romance, no meed of
martyrdom to illumine them, are seen to have been huge and grotesque
mistakes of a humanity that at times gives itself over to the elemental
savage lust of the blood of its fellows.

I do not say, of course, that there was any similarity between the
offenses of those whom Jones and I were concerned about in those days
and those striking figures who illustrate the history of the world
and mark the slow spiral path of the progress of mankind; these were
the commonest of common criminals, poor, mistaken, misshapen beings,
somehow marred in the making.

It was my lot to defend a number of those who had committed murders,
some of them murders so foul that there was nothing to say in their
behalf. All one could say was in behalf of those whom one would save
from committing another murder. But when you have come to know even
a murderer, when day after day you have visited him in his cell, and
have talked with him, and have seen him laugh and cry, and have had
him tell you about his family, and that amazing complexity which he
calls his life, when gradually you come to know him, no matter how
undeserving he may be in the abstract, he undergoes a strange and
subtle metamorphosis; slowly and gradually, without your being aware,
he ceases to be a murderer, and becomes a human being, very much like
all those about you. Thus, there is no such thing as a human being in
the abstract; they are all thoroughly and essentially concrete.

I have wandered far in these speculations, but I hope I have not
wandered too far to make it clear that Jones’s point of view was always
and invariably the human point of view; he knew no such thing as
murderers, or even criminals, or “good” people, or “bad” people, they
were all to him men and, indeed, brothers. And if society did not care
about them, except in its desire to make way with them, Jones did care,
and there were others who cared; the poor cared, the working people
cared,--though they might themselves at times give way to the same
elemental social rage,--they always endorsed Jones’s leniency whenever
they had the opportunity. They had this opportunity at the polls every
two years, and they never failed him.

They did not fail him even in that last campaign of his, though every
means known to man was tried to win them away from their peculiar
allegiance. It was a strange campaign; I suppose there was never
another like it in America. As I think of it there come back the
recollections of those raw spring nights; we held our municipal
elections in the spring in those days, that is, spring as we know
it in the region of the Great Lakes. It is not so much spring as
it is a final summing-up and recapitulation of winter, a coda to a
monstrous meteorological concerto as doleful as the allegro lamentoso
of Tschaikovsky’s “Sixth Symphony.” There is nowhere in the world, so
far as I know, or care to know, such an abominable manifestation of the
meanness of nature; it is meaner than the meanness of human nature,
entailing a constant struggle with winds, a perpetual bending to gusts
of snow that is rain, or a rain that is hail, with an east wind that
blows persistently off Lake Erie for two months, with little stinging
barbs of ice on its breath--and then, suddenly, it is summer without
any gentle airs at all to introduce its heat.

Jones was not very well that spring; and his throaty ailment was the
very one that should have been spared such dreadful exposures as he
was subjected to in that campaign. It was in the days before motor
cars, and he and I drove about every night from one meeting to another
in a little buggy he had, drawn by an old white mare named Molly,
whose shedding of her coat was the only vernal sign to be detected
anywhere. But Jones was so full of humor that he laughed at nearly
everything--even his enemies, whom he never would call enemies. I can
see him now--climbing down out of the buggy, carefully blanketing old
Molly against the raw blasts, then brushing the white hairs from his
front with his enormous hands, and running like a boy up the stairway
to the dim little hall in the Polish quarter where the crowd had
gathered. The men set up a shout when they saw him, and he leaped on
the stage and, without waiting for the chairman to introduce him,--he
scorned every convention that obtruded itself,--he leaned over the
front of the platform and said:

“What is the Polish word for liberty?”

The crowd of Poles, huddling about a stove in the middle of the hall,
their caps on, their pipes going furiously, their bodies covered with
the strange garments they had brought with them across the sea, shouted
in reply.

“_Wolność!_”

And Jones paused and listened, cocked his head, wrinkled his brows, and
said:

“What was that? Say it again!”

Again they shouted it.

“Say it again--once more!” he demanded. And again they shouted it in a
splendid chorus. And then----

“Well,” said Golden Rule Jones, “I can’t pronounce it, but it sounds
good, and that is what we are after in this campaign.”

Now that I have written it down, I have a feeling that I have utterly
failed to give an adequate sense of the entire spontaneity and
simplicity with which this was done. It was, of course, tremendously
effective as a bit of campaigning, but only because it was so wholly
sincere. Five minutes later he was hotly debating with a working man
who had interrupted him to accuse him of being unfair to union labor in
his shops, and there was no coddling, no truckling, no effort to win or
to please on his part, though he would take boundlessly patient pains
to explain to anyone who really wanted to know anything about him or
his official acts.

He was natural, simple and unspoiled, as naïve as a child, and “except
ye become as little children ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”
He fully realized that the kingdom of heaven is within one’s self; he
was not looking for it, or expecting it anywhere outside of himself,
certainly he was not expecting it in a political campaign, or in the
mere process of being elected to an office. He regarded his office,
indeed, only as an opportunity to serve, and he had been in that office
long enough to have lost any illusions he may ever have had concerning
it; one term will suffice to teach a man that lesson, even though he
seek the office again.

He was like an evangelist, in a way, and his meetings were in the broad
sense religious, though he had long since left his church, not because
its ministers were always condemning him, but for the same reasons
that Tolstoy left his church. His evangel was that of liberty. He had
written a number of little songs. One of them, set to the tune of an
old hymn he had heard in Wales as a boy, had a noble effect when
the crowd sang it. It was the _Gad im Deimle_. His wife, who is an
accomplished musician, had transposed its minors into majors, and in
its strains, as they were sung by the men in his shops,--and there was
singing for you!--or by the people in his political meetings, there was
all the Welsh love of music, all the Welsh love of liberty, and a high
and pure emotion in the chorus:

  Ever growing, swiftly flowing,
  Like a mighty river
  Sweeping on from shore to shore,
  Love will rule this wide world o’er.

It was his Welsh blood, this Celtic strain in him, that accounted for
much that was in his temperament, his wit, his humor, his instinctive
appreciation of art, his contempt for artificial distinctions, his
love of liberty, his passionate democracy. Sitting one evening not
long ago in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons I saw the
great Welsh radical, David Lloyd George, saw him enter and take his
seat on the government bench. And as I looked at him I was impressed by
his resemblance to someone I had known; there was a strange, haunting
likeness, not in any physical characteristic, though there was the same
Welsh ruddiness, and the hair was something like--but when Mr. Lloyd
George turned and whispered to the prime minister and smiled I started,
and said to myself: “It is Jones!”




XXIII


There was something pathetic in that last campaign, the pathos,
perhaps, of the last phase. The long years of opposition had begun
to tell: there was a strong determination to defeat him. He had not
wished to stand again for the office, but, after the Toledo custom,
there had been presented to him an informal petition, signed by several
thousand citizens, asking him to do so, and he had consented. But when
he wrote a statement setting forth his position--it was a document with
the strong flavor of his personality in it--the newspapers refused to
publish it; some of them would not publish it even as advertising, and
he opened his campaign on the post-office corner, standing bare-headed
in the March wind, his son Paul blowing a saxophone to attract a crowd.
Many of his old supporters were falling away; it seemed for a time that
he alone would have to make the campaign without any to speak for him
on the stump; far otherwise than in that second campaign, when, after
having been counted out in the Republican convention, he had run for
the first time independently, a “Man Without a Party,” as he called
himself; and thousands, themselves outraged by the treatment his own
party had accorded him, in the spirit of fair play had rallied to his
standard.

But now things had changed, and an incident which occurred at the
beginning of this campaign was significant of the feeling toward him,
though in all kindness it most not be told in detail. There was a
prominent man in town who had publicly reviled him and criticized him
and persecuted him, who had done that which cut him more deeply than
all else, that is, he had impugned his motives and questioned his
sincerity. In some human hunger for understanding, I suppose, Jones
went to this man with his written statement of his position and asked
him to read it, merely to read it. The fellow’s answer was to snatch
the paper from Jones’s hand and tear it up in his face. It is easy to
imagine what a man ordinarily would do in the face of such an amazing
insult; surely, if ever, the time had come for the “shotgun and the
club.” Mayor Jones was large and powerful, he had been reared in the
oil fields, where blows are quick as tempers; he was athletic, always
in training, for he took constant physical exercise (one of the counts
against him, indeed, was that he slept out of doors on the roof of his
back porch, a bit of radicalism in those days, grown perfectly orthodox
in these progressive times), and he was a Celt, naturally quick to
resent insult, of a temperament prompt to take fire. But he turned away
from the fellow, without a word.

He came to my office immediately afterward, and I saw that he was
trying hard to master some unusual emotion. I shall never forget him as
he sat there, telling me of his experience. After a little while his
face broke into that beautiful smile of his, more beautiful than I had
ever seen it, and he said:

“Well, I’ve won the greatest victory of my life; I have won at last
a victory over myself, over my own nature. I have done what it has
always been hardest for me to do.”

“What?” I asked.

He sat in silence for a moment, and then he said:

“You know, it has always seemed to me that the most remarkable thing
that was ever said of Jesus was that when he was reviled, he reviled
not again. It is the hardest thing in the world to do.”

The struggle over the renewal of the franchise grants to the street
railway company had already begun, and the council had attempted to
grant it the franchise it wished, renewing its privileges for another
twenty-five years. When Mayor Jones vetoed the bill, the council
prepared to pass it over his veto, and would have done so that Monday
night had it not been for two men--Mayor Jones and Mr. Negley D.
Cochran, the editor of the _News-Bee_, a newspaper which has always
taken the democratic viewpoint of public questions. Mr. Cochran, with
his brilliant gift in the writing of editorials, had called out the
whole populace, almost, to attend the meeting of the council and to
protest. The demonstration was so far effective that the council was
too frightened to pass the street railway ordinance. The attorney for
the street railway company was there, and when there was a lull in the
noise, he sneered:

“I suppose, Mr. Mayor, that this is an example of government under the
Golden Rule.”

“No,” replied Jones in a flash, “it is an example of government under
the rule of gold.”

Unless it were because of his interference with the nefarious
privileges of a few, one can see no reason why the press and pulpit
should have opposed him. What had he done? He had only preached that
the fundamental doctrine of Christianity was sound, and, as much as a
man may in so complex a civilization, he had tried to practice it. He
had taught kindness and tolerance, and pity and mercy; he had visited
the sick, and gone to those that were in prison; he had said that all
men are free and equal, that they have been endowed by their Creator
with certain inalienable rights. He had said that it is wrong to kill
people, even in the electric chair, that it is wrong to take from the
poor, without giving them in return. He had not said these things in
anger, or in bitterness; he had never been personal, he had always been
explicit in saying that he, as a part of society, was equally to blame
with all the rest for social wrongs. The only textbooks he ever used in
his campaigns were the New Testament, the Declaration of Independence,
and, of course, his beloved Walt Whitman. And yet the pulpits rang
every Sunday with denunciations of him, and the newspapers opposed
him. Why was it, because a man endorsed these old doctrines upon which
society claims to rest, that society should denounce him?

I think it was because he was so utterly and entirely sincere, and
because he believed these things, and tried to put them into practice
in his life, and wished them to be more fully incorporated in the life
of society. Society will forgive anything in a man, except sincerity.
If he be sincere in charity, in pity, in mercy, in sympathy for the
outcast, the despised, the imprisoned, all that vast horde of the
denied and proscribed, still less will it forgive him, for it knows
instinctively that the privileges men have or seek could not exist in a
system where these principles were admitted as vital, inspiring force.

There was nothing, of course, for one who believed in the American
doctrines to do but to support such a man, and when he appeared to be
so utterly without supporters it seemed to be one’s duty more than
ever, though I own to having shrunk from such unconventional methods as
Jones employed. That meeting at the post-office corner, for instance;
someone might laugh, and in the great American self-consciousness and
fear of the ridiculous, what was one to do? The opposition, that is,
the two old parties, the Republican and Democratic, had nominated
excellent men against Jones; the Republican nominee, indeed, Mr. John
W. Dowd, was a man to whom I had gone to school, an old and very dear
friend of our family, a charming gentleman of cultivated tastes. It
was not easy to be in the attitude of opposing him, but my duty seemed
clear, and I went into the campaign with Jones, and we spoke together
every night.

It was a campaign in which were discussed most of the fundamental
problems of social life. A stranger, coming to Toledo at that time,
might have thought us a most unsophisticated people, for there were
speculations about the right of society to inflict punishment, the
basis of property, and a rather searching inquiry into the subject of
representative government. This was involved in the dispute as to the
propriety of political machines, for the Republicans by that time had a
party organization so strong that it was easily denominated a machine;
it was so strong that it controlled every branch of the city government
except the executive; it never could defeat Jones. There was a good
deal said, too, about the enforcement of law, a subject which has its
fascination for the people of my town.




XXIV


Besides these interesting topics there was the subject of municipal
home rule. This had already become vital in Toledo because, a year or
so before, the Republican party organization through its influence
in the state, without having to strain its powers of persuasion, had
induced the legislature to pass a special law which deprived the Mayor
of Toledo of his control of the police force and vested the government
of that body in a commission appointed by the governor of the state.

It had been, of course, a direct offense to Jones, and it was intended
to take from him the last of his powers. He had been greatly roused
by it; the morning after the law had been enacted he had appeared
at my house before breakfast to discuss this latest assault upon
liberty. The law was an exact replica of a law that had been passed for
Cincinnati many years before, and that law had been sustained by the
Supreme Court in a decision which had made it the leading case on that
subject of constitutional law for a whole generation. Time and again
it had been attacked and always it had been sustained; to contest the
constitutionality of this new act seemed the veriest folly.

But Jones was determined to resist; like some stout burgomaster of an
old free city of Germany he determined to stand out against the city’s
overlords from the rural districts, and he insisted on my representing
him in the litigation which his resistance would certainly provoke.
I had no hope of winning, and told him so; I explained the precedent
in the Cincinnati case, and that only made him more determined; if
there was one thing more than another for which he had a supreme and
sovereign contempt it was a legal precedent. My brethren at the bar all
laughed at me, as I knew they would; but I went to work, and after a
few days’ investigation became convinced that the doctrine laid down in
that leading case was not at all sound.

When I came to this conviction, I induced Jones to retain additional
counsel, one of the most brilliant lawyers at our bar, Mr. Clarence
Brown, a man who, in addition to his knowledge of the law, could bring
to the forum a charming personality, a wit and an eloquence that were
irresistible. He, too, set to work, and in a few days he was convinced,
as I, that the precedent should be overthrown. Jones refused to turn
over the command of the police to the new commissioners whom the
governor appointed; they applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of
mandamus, we tried the case, and we won, overthrowing not only the
doctrine at the Cincinnati case, but the whole fabric of municipal
legislation in the state, so that a special session of the legislature
was necessary to enact new codes for the government of the cities.

Our satisfaction and our pride in our legal achievement was somewhat
modified by the fact that the application of the same rule to
conditions in our sister city of Cleveland had the effect, in certain
cases then pending, of pulling down the work which another great mayor,
Tom L. Johnson, was then doing in that city. It was even said that the
Supreme Court had been influenced by the desire of Mark Hanna, Tom
Johnson’s ancient enemy in Cleveland, to see his old rival defeated.
Some were unkind enough to say that Mark Hanna’s influence was more
powerful with the court, as at that time constituted, than was the
logic of the attorneys who were representing Golden Rule Jones.

But however that may have been, the decision in that case had ultimate
far-reaching effects in improving the conditions in Ohio cities, and
was the beginning of a conflict that did not end until they were free
and autonomous. In my own case it was the beginning of a study of
municipal government that has grown more fascinating as the years have
fled, a study that has led me to see, or to think that I see, the large
hope of our democracy in the cities of America.

I regard it as Jones’s supreme contribution to the thought of his time
that, by the mere force of his own original character and personality,
he compelled a discussion of fundamental principles of government.
Toledo to-day is a community which has a wider acquaintance with all
the abstract principles of social relations than any other city in the
land, or in the world, since, when one ventures into generalities, one
might as well make them as sweeping as one can.

Jones’s other great contribution to the science of municipal government
was that of non-partizanship in local affairs. That is the way he used
to express it; what he meant was that the issues of national politics
must not be permitted to obtrude themselves into municipal campaigns,
and that what divisions there are should be confined to local issues.
There is, of course, in our cities, as in our land or any land, only
one issue, that which is presented by the conflict of the aristocratic,
or plutocratic, spirit and the spirit of democracy.

Jones used to herald himself as “a Man Without a Party,” but he was
a great democrat, the most fundamental I ever knew or imagined; he
summed up in himself, as no other figure of our time since Lincoln,
all that the democratic spirit is and hopes to be. Perhaps in this
characterization I seem to behold his figure larger than it was in
relation to the whole mass, but while his work may appear at first
glance local, it was really general and universal. No one can estimate
the peculiar and lively force of such a personality; certainly no one
can presume to limit his influence, for such a spirit is illimitable
and irresistible.

He was elected in that last campaign for the fourth time, but he did
not live very long. He had never, it seemed to me, been quite the same
after the day when he had that experience of insult which he did not
resent. “Draw the sting,” he used to counsel us when, in our campaign
harangues, we became bitter, or sarcastic, or merely smart. He had
supreme reliance on the simple truth, on the power of reasonableness.
He never reviled again; he never sought to even scores. When he died
the only wounds he left in human hearts were because he was no more.
They understood him at last, those who had scoffed and sneered and
abused and vilified, and I, who had had the immense privilege of his
friendship, and thought I knew him,--when I stood that July afternoon,
on the veranda of his home, beside his bier to speak at his funeral,
and looked out over the thousands who were gathered on the wide lawn
before his home,--I realized that I, too, had not wholly understood him.

I know not how many thousands were there; they were standing on the
lawns in a mass that extended across the street and into the yards
on the farther side. Down to the corner, and into the side streets,
they were packed, and they stood in long lines all the way out to the
cemetery. In that crowd there were all sorts of that one sort he knew
as humanity without distinction,--judges, and women of prominence
and women whom he alone would have included in humanity, there were
thieves, and prize-fighters,--and they all stood there with the tears
streaming down their faces.

There is no monument to Golden Rule Jones in Toledo; and since St.
Gaudens is gone I know of no one who could conceive him in marble
or in bronze. There is not a public building which he erected, no
reminder of him which the eye can see or the hands touch. But his name
is spoken here a thousand times a day, and always with the reverence
that marks the passage of a great man upon the earth. And I am sure
that his influence did not end here. Did not a letter come from Yasnaya
Polyana in the handwriting of the great Tolstoy, who somehow had heard
of this noble and simple soul who was, in his own way, trying the same
experiment of life which the great Russian was making?




XXV


In the beginning, of course, it was inevitable that Jones should have
been called a Socialist. I suppose he did not care much himself, but
the Socialists cared, and promptly disowned him, and were at one with
the capitalists in their hatred and abuse of him. He shared, no doubt,
the Socialists’ great dream of an ordered society, though he would not
have ordered it by any kind of force or compulsion, but in that spirit
which they sneer at as mere sentimentalism. He was patient with them;
he saw their point of view; he had, indeed, the immense advantage of
being in advance of them in his development. He saw Socialism not,
as most see it, from the hither side, but from the farther side, as
one who has passed through it; he was like a man who having left the
dusty highway and entered a wood which he thinks his journey’s end,
suddenly emerges and from a hill beholds the illimitable prospect that
lies beyond. Of course he could never endure anything so doctrinaire as
Socialism, in the form in which he was accustomed to see it exemplified
in the Socialists about him. He could not endure their orthodoxy, any
more than he could endure the orthodoxy they were contending against.
Their sectarianism was to him quite as impossible as that sectarianism
he had known in other fields. Their bigotry was as bad as any. He saw
no good to come from a substitution of their tyranny for any other of
the many old tyrannies in the world. And naturally to one of his spirit
the class hatred they were always inciting under the name of class
consciousness was as abhorrent to him as all hatred was.

Sometimes the Socialists, with their passion for generalization, for
labeling and pigeonholing everything in the universe, said he was
an anarchist. The more charitable of them, wishing to sterilize the
term and rid it of its sinister implication, but still insistently
scientific, said he was a “philosophic” anarchist. That is a term
too vague to use, though in one sense, I suppose, all good men are
anarchists, in that they would live their lives as well without laws as
with them. Jones himself would have scorned those classifications as
readily as he would had anyone said he was a duke or an earl. “No title
is higher than Man,” he wrote once in a little campaign song. And he
was that--a Man.

He would not join any society or, as he said, “belong” to anything. I
have thought so often of what he said to a book agent one day. We were
just on the point of leaving the Mayor’s office for luncheon, and the
individual who wishes “just a minute” was inevitably there, blocking
the way out of the office. He was indubitably a book agent; anyone
who has a rudimentary knowledge of human nature can identify them at
once, but this one had as his insinuating disguise some position as a
representative of a Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, and he was
there to confer on the Mayor the honor of a membership in that society.

“And what books am I required to buy?” asked Jones.

“Well,” the agent said, “you are not required to buy any books,
but, of course, a member of the association would naturally want
Mr. Jefferson’s complete works.” Jones’s eyes were twinkling; “Mr.”
Jefferson amused him immensely, of course.

“They are very popular,” the man went on, “many persons are buying
them.”

“I don’t find the ideas in them very popular; certainly those in Mr.
Jefferson’s greatest work are not popular; no one wants to see them
adopted.”

“To which one of his works do you refer?” asked the agent.

“Why, the one that is best known,” said Jones, “its title is ‘The
Declaration of Independence.’ I already have a copy of that.”

The poor fellow was conscious that his enterprise was not going very
well, but he said, with a flourish of magnanimity:

“Oh, well, it’s immaterial to me whether you take the books or not, but
of course you will wish to belong to the association?”

“But I already belong to the association in which Mr. Jefferson was
chiefly interested,” said Jones.

“What is that, may I ask?” said the agent.

“The United States of America,” said Jones, “and as I am a member of
that, I see no reason why I should join anything smaller.”

And then he laughed, and if there had been any uneasiness because of
his gentle guying, it disappeared when he laid his hand on the agent’s
shoulder and looked into his eyes in that spirit of friendliness which
enveloped him like an aureole.

He had a conception of unity that was far beyond his contemporaries,
a conception that will be beyond humanity for many years. It was that
conception which enabled him to see through the vast superstition of
war, and the superstition of partizanship, and all the other foolish
credulities that have misled the people in all times.

One evening, it was just at dark, we were leaving the mayor’s office
to walk home--we walked home together nearly every evening--and in the
dusk a tramp, a negro, came up and asked him for the price of a night’s
lodging. The Mayor fumbled in his pockets, but he had no small change,
he had only a five-dollar bill, but he gave this to the tramp and said:

“Go get it changed, and bring it back.”

The tramp took it and disappeared, and we waited. Jones talked on about
other things, but I was interested in the tramp; my expectation of his
return was far more uncertain than Jones’s. But after a while the tramp
did come back, and he poured out into the Mayor’s hand the change in
silver coin. The Mayor complained humanly of the heavy silver which
the Secretary of the Treasury always sends out to us, so that the new
one-dollar bills may go to New York City, and tumbled the money into
his trousers pocket.

“But ain’t you goin’ to count it?” asked the negro in surprise.

“Did you count it?” asked Jones.

“Yes, suh, I counted it.”

“Was it all there, wasn’t it all right?”

“Yes, suh.”

“Well, then, there’s no need for me to count it, is there?”

The negro looked in wide white-eyed surprise.

“Did you take out what you wanted?” asked the Mayor.

“No, suh, I didn’t take any.”

“Here, then,” said Jones, and he gave the man a half-dollar and went on.

There was no possible ostentation in this; it was perfectly natural; he
was doing such things every hour of the day.

He had no need to stop there, in the dark, to impress me, his friend
and intimate. I do him wrong even to stoop to explain so much. But I
wonder how much good his confidence did that wandering outcast? How
much good did it do to me? By the operation of the same law which
brought that vagrant back to Jones’s side with all the money, I with my
distrust, might have been treated far differently.

Or so, at least, it seems to me, and I tell this incident as one which
proves the reverence Jones had for the great natural law of love.
For the chief count in the indictment respectability brought against
him was that he had no reverence for law. To see and hear them when
they said this, one would have supposed that a council or legislature
had never been corrupted in the land. It used to amuse Jones to
reflect that his literal acceptance of the fundamental principle of
Christianity should have been such a novel and unprecedented thing that
it instantly marked him out from all the other Christians and made him
famous in Christendom.




XXVI


I say famous, and perhaps I mean only notorious, for in the beginning
many of his townsmen meant it as a reflection, and not a tribute. Some
of them said it was but an advertising dodge, a bit of demagogism, but
as Jones applied the rule to everybody, other explanations had soon to
be adopted, and after he had employed it about the City Hall for two
years the situation became so desperate that something had to be done.
Controversy was provoked, and for almost a decade, Toledo presented
the unique spectacle of a modern city in which this principle was
discussed as though it were something newly discovered. Some seemed
to think that Jones had invented it; they said it was absurd, that
it really would not work. Of course most regarded it, as most now
regard the Golden Rule, as a pretty sentiment merely, something for
the children in Sunday-school. It is considered, of course, as any
sophisticated person knows, as altogether impractical, and even silly
and absurd.

To be sure, the clergymen were under some sort of professional
necessity of treating it seriously, and they used to prepare profound
papers, arranged in heads and subheads, with titles and subtitles, and
after all the usual ostentatious preliminary examination of the grounds
and the authorities, and with the appearance of academic fairness,
in discussions that were formal, exact, redolent of the oil, bearing
the hallmark of the schools, they would show that Jesus meant there
were only certain exigencies in which, and certain persons to whom,
this rule was to be applied. It was all very learned and impressive,
but one was apt to develop a disturbing doubt as to whether one was
of those to whom it was to be applied. It was certainly not to be
applied to criminals, or perhaps even to politicians. It was not to be
applied to poor people, or to the working people, unless they were in
Sunday-school as conscious inferiors, in devout and penitent attitudes.
And as these people were so seldom in church or Sunday-school, and as
those who were there apparently needed no such consideration, these
discourses left one rather uncertain as to what to do with the Golden
Rule.

All men of course believe in the Golden Rule, or say they do, but they
believe in it only “up to a certain point,” and with each individual
this point differs; the moment in which to abandon the Rule and take
to “the shotgun and the club” comes to some soon, to others late, and
to some oftener than others; but to most, if not to all of us, it
inevitably arrives. That is why, no doubt, the world is no farther
along in the solution of the many distressing problems it has on its
mind.

According to the standards of conduct and of “honor” inherited from
the feudal ages, while personal violence may be conceded to be
illegal, one is, nevertheless, still generally taught that it is wrong
and unmanly not to resent an insult or an injury, by violence, if
necessary,--fighting and killing, by individuals, states and nations,
are thought to be not only honorable and worthy, but, in many cases,
indispensable. Society has an obsession similar to that strange
superstition of the feud, which affects the Kentucky mountaineers.
Generally we are less afraid to fight than we are not to fight. Our
system is based on force, our faith is placed in force, so that nearly
all of the proposals of reform, for the correction of abuses, involve
the use of violence in some form. We have erected a huge idol in the
figure of the beadle, who, assisted by the constable, is to make
society over, to make men “good.” Jones came upon the scene in America
at a time when there was undoubtedly a new and really splendid impetus
toward a better and higher conception of life and conduct, both in
public and private. Yet even then no other thought seemed to possess
the public mind than that someone should be put in prison and made to
suffer.

Men did not and do not see what Jones saw so much more clearly than
any other reformer of his time, namely that, above all the laws men
make with their political machines in their legislatures, there is a
higher law, and that the Golden Rule is a rule of conduct deduced from
that law. He saw that men, whether they knew it or not, liked it or
not, or were conscious of it or not, had in all times been living, and
must forever go on living, under the principle on which the Golden Rule
is based. That is, Jones saw that this great law had always existed
in the universe, just as the law of gravitation existed before Newton
discovered it. It is inherent in the very constitution of things, as
one of that body of laws which govern the universe and always act and
react equally among men. And Jones felt that men should for their
comfort, if for no higher motive, respect this law and get the best
out of life by observing it; and that it should be the business of men
through their governments to seek out this law and the rules that might
scientifically be deduced from it, instead of putting their faith in
their own contrivances of statutes, resolutions, orders, and decrees,
and, when these would not work, trying to make them effective through
grand juries and petit juries, and all the hideous machinery of jails
and prisons, and scaffolds and electric chairs. And because he had no
superstitious reverence for policemen or their clubs, or for soldiers
and their bayonets and machine guns, they said he had no reverence for
law.

He had, of course, been to the legislature; he had seen the midnight
sessions there, when statutes were enacted amid scenes of drunken
riot and confusion, and he saw no reason why he should have reverence
for the acts of these men. Perhaps he was wrong; I am only trying
to tell how it appeared to him. He was not a lawyer, but he knew
what many lawyers have never learned, that there is sometimes a vast
difference between a statute and a law. He saw that not all statutes
are laws; that they are laws only when, by accident or design, they
are in conformity with those rules by which the universe is governed,
whether in the physical or the spiritual world, and these laws, eternal
and immutable, are invariable, self-executing, instant in operation,
without judges to declare them, or executives to enforce them, or
courts to say whether they are unconstitutional or not.

He saw that the law on which the Golden Rule is founded, the law of
moral action and reaction, is the one most generally ignored. Its
principle he felt to be always at work, so that men lived by it whether
they wished to or not, whether they knew it or not. According to this
law, hate breeds hate and love produces love in return; and all force
begets resistance, and the result is the general disorder and anarchy
in which we live so much of the time.

It may be that in this view of life some dangerous apothegms are
involved; as we grow older we grow conservative, and conservatism is
a kind of cynicism, a kind of fear, the trembling distrust of age.
But I know that in the life concept to which Jones came in his study
of this principle, every act of his life, no matter how trifling and
insignificant it may have seemed, suddenly took on a vast and vital
significance; so that the hasty glance, the unkind word, the very
spirit in which a thing is said or done, were seen to have an effect
which may reach farther than the imagination can go, an effect not
only on one’s own life and character, but on the lives and characters
of all those about him. He was always human; I say that to prevent any
impression that he was solemn or priggish; he deliberately took up
smoking, for instance, toward the end of his days, because, he said
with a chuckle, one must have some vices. And sometimes when the Golden
Rule seemed not to “work,” he would truly say it was only because he
didn’t know how to work it. And he used to quote Walt Whitman:

  The song is to the singer and comes back most to him;

         *       *       *       *       *

  The love is to the lover and comes back most to him;
  The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him--it cannot fail.




XXVII


I first saw Tom Johnson in the early nineties in Cleveland, at a
Democratic state convention, where one naturally might have expected
to see him. I had gone to Cleveland to report the convention for the
Chicago _Herald_, and since it was summer, and summer in Ohio, it was
a pleasant thing to be back again among the Democrats of my own state,
many of whom I had known, some of whom I honored. And that morning--I
think it was the morning after some frenzied members of the Hamilton
county delegation had been shooting at one another in Banks Street
in an effort to settle certain of those differences in the science
of statecraft which then were apt, as they are now, to trouble the
counsels of the Cincinnati politicians--I was walking along Superior
Street when I heard a band playing the sweet and somehow pathetic
strains of “Home Again, Home Again.” There were other bands playing
that morning, but the prevailing tune was “The Campbells are Coming”;
for we might as well have been Scotchmen at the siege of Lucknow in
Ohio during those years that James E. Campbell was Governor of our
state. We grew to love the tune and we grew to love him, he was so
brilliant and human and affable; but he could not pose very well in a
frock coat, and after he had been renominated at that very convention,
McKinley defeated him for governor.

But as I was saying, it was not “The Campbells are Coming” which
the band was playing that morning, but “Home Again,” and along the
wide street, with an intimate sense of proprietorship that excluded
strangers from this particular demonstration, people were saying:

“It’s Tom Johnson, home from Europe!”

It was his own employees who had gone forth to meet him, the men who
worked for him in the street railway system he owned in Cleveland in
those days, and I thought it rather a pretty compliment that a man’s
employees should like him so well that they would turn out to welcome
him with a band when he came home from his holiday abroad. I could
understand their feeling when an hour later I saw Tom Johnson in the
Hollenden Hotel, the center of a group of political friends; he seemed
as glad as any of them to be back among so many Democrats. He still
had his youth, and there was in his manner a peculiar, subtle charm, a
gift with which the gods are rather stingy among the sons of men. I can
see him now, his curly hair moist with the heat of the summer day, his
profile, clear enough for a Greek coin, and the smile that never failed
him, or failed a situation, to the end. He was, I think, in Congress in
those days of which I am writing, or if he was not, he went to Congress
soon after from one of the Cleveland districts. And while he was there
he wrote a remarkable letter in response to a communication he had
received from some girls who worked in a cloak factory in Cleveland,
asking him to vote against the Wilson tariff bill when it was amended
by adding a specific duty to the _ad valorem_ duty on women’s cloaks.
The girls, of course, poor things, had not written the communication;
it was written by the editor of a protectionist newspaper in Cleveland,
and the response which Johnson sent was one of the simplest and
clearest expositions of the evils of protection I ever read. I had read
it when it was published, and had been delighted, but it was not for a
dozen years that I was able to tell Johnson of my delight, and then one
day as he and Dr. Frederic C. Howe and I were at luncheon I spoke of
the letter. He laughed.

“It was a great letter, wasn’t it?” he said.

“Indeed it was,” I replied.

“A wonderful letter,” he went on. “You know, it completely shut them up
around here. The editor of that paper tried for weeks to reply to it,
and then he gave it up, and he told me privately some time afterward
that he was sure the theory of protection was right, but that it
wouldn’t work on women’s cloaks. Yes, it was a great letter.” And then
with a sigh, he added: “I wish I could have written such a letter.
Henry George worked on that letter for days and nights before we got
it to suit us; I’d think and think, and he’d write and write, and then
tear up what he had written, but finally we got it down.”

Henry George was the great influence in his life, as he has been the
influence in the lives of so many in this world. Johnson had been a
plutocrat; he had made, or to use a distinction Golden Rule Jones
used to insist upon, he had “gathered,” by the time he was thirty,
an immense fortune, through legal privileges. Johnson’s privileges
had been tariffs on steel, and street railway franchises in several
cities, and thus early in life he was almost ready for that most
squalid of all poverty, mere possession. And then suddenly he had a
marvelous experience, one that comes to few men; he caught a vision of
a new social order.

He was on a railway train going from Indianapolis to New York, and the
news agent on the train importuned him to buy a novel. Johnson waved
him aside--I can imagine with what imperious impatience. But this agent
was not to be waved aside; he persisted after the manner of his kind;
he had that weird occult power by which the book agent weaves his spell
and paralyses the will, even such a superior will as Tom Johnson’s,
and the agent sold to him, not a novel, but Henry George’s “Social
Problems.” He was not given to reading; he read only for information,
and even then he usually had someone else read to him. Once during his
last illness he asked me what I was reading, and I told him Ferrero’s
“Rome,” and tried to give him some notion of Ferrero’s description of
the political machine which Cæsar and Pompey had organized, and of
the private fire department of Crassus, and he said: “Well, I’ll have
Newton read it to me.” He used to wonder sometimes half wistfully,
as though he were missing some good in life, how it was that I loved
poetry so, and it was somehow consoling when Mr. Richard McGhee, that
fine Irish member of Parliament, told me one night in the House of
Commons that when Johnson made that last journey to England he had read
Burns to him, and that Johnson had loved and even recited certain
passages from them. Well then, Johnson bought his book, and idly
turning the pages began to read, became interested, finally enthralled,
and read on and on. Later he bought “Progress and Poverty,” and as he
read that wonderful book, as there dawned upon his consciousness the
awful realization that notwithstanding all the amazing progress mankind
has made in the world, poverty has kept even pace with it, stalking
ever at its side, that with all of man’s inventions, labor-saving
devices, and all that, there has been no such amelioration of the
human lot, no such improvement in society as should have come from so
much effort and achievement, he had a spiritual awakening, experienced
within him something that was veritably, as the Methodists would say, a
“conversion.” There was an instant revolution in his nature, or in his
purpose; he turned to confront life in an entirely new attitude, and he
began to have that which so many, rich and poor, utterly lack, so many
to whom existence is but a meaningless confusion of the senses, a life
concept. And with this new concept there came a new ideal.

He at once sought out Henry George, the two became fast friends, and
the friendship lasted until George’s dramatic death in the midst of his
campaign for the mayoralty of New York. George used to do much of his
work at the Johnson home in Cleveland--and used to forget to fasten his
collar when he was called from that spell of concentration over his
desk to the dinner table. The Johnsons were aristocrats from Kentucky,
descended from a long line of southern ancestors. And yet Tom Johnson
was a Democrat, from conviction and principle. In fact it seems almost
as though the cause of democracy would never have got on at all if
now and then it had not had aristocrats to lead it, as ever it has
had, from the times of the Gracchi to those of the Mirabeaus and the
Lafayettes and the Jeffersons.

Tom Johnson made an instant impression when he went into politics, and
he went in on the explicit advice of Henry George. When he arose in the
House of Representatives at Washington to make his first speech, no one
paid the least attention. It is, I suppose, the most difficult place in
the world to speak, not so much because of the audience, but because of
the arrangement; that scattered expanse of desks is not conducive to
dramatic effect, or to any focusing of interest. The British Parliament
is the only one in the world that is seated properly; there the old
form of the lists is maintained, opponents meet literally face to face
across that narrow chamber. But when Johnson arose at Washington, there
were those scattered desks, and the members--lolling at their desks,
writing letters, reading newspapers, clapping their hands for pages,
gossiping, sauntering about, arising and going out, giving no heed
whatever. But Tom Johnson had not spoken many words before Tom Reed,
then the leader on the Republican side, suddenly looked up, listened,
put his hand behind his ear, and leaning forward intently said: “Sh!”
and thus brought his followers to attention before the new and strong
personality whose power he had so instantly recognized.

It was a power that was felt in that House. They tried to shelve
him; they put him on the committee for the District of Columbia, and
no shelf could have pleased him more, or been better suited to his
peculiar genius, for it gave him a city to deal with. The very first
thing he did was to investigate the revenues of the District, and he
made a report on the subject, based on the theories underlying the
proposition of the single tax. He tried to have the single tax adopted
for the District, and while he failed in that design his report is a
classic on the whole subject of municipal taxation, even if, like most
classics, it is little read. He made some splendid speeches, too, on
the tariff, and by a clever device, under the rule giving members leave
to print what no one is willing to hear, he contrived, with the help
of several colleagues, to distribute over the land more than a million
copies of Henry George’s “Protection and Free Trade,” giving that work
a larger circulation than all the six best sellers among the romantic
novels.

It is one of the peculiar weaknesses of our political system that
our strongest men cannot be kept very long in Congress, and it was
Johnson’s fate to be defeated after his second term, but he then
entered a field of political activity which was not only thoroughly
congenial to him, but one in which for the present the struggle for
democracy must be carried on. That field is the field of municipal
politics which he entered just at the time of the awakening which
marked the first decade of the new century.




XXVIII


When I think of the beginning of that period my thought goes back to
an afternoon in New York, when, sitting in the editorial rooms of
_McClure’s Magazine_, Lincoln Steffens said to me:

“I’m going to do a series of articles for the magazine on municipal
government.”

“And what do you know about municipal government?” I asked in the tone
a man may adopt with his friend.

“Nothing,” he replied. “That’s why I’m going to write about it.”

We smiled in the pleasure we both had in his fun, but we did not talk
long about municipal government as we were to do in the succeeding
years; we had more interesting subjects to discuss just then.

I had been on a holiday to New England with my friend John D. Barry,
and had just come from Maine where I had spent a week at Kittery Point,
in the delight of long summer afternoons in the company of Mr. William
Dean Howells, whom, indeed, in my vast admiration, and I might say,
my reverence for him, I had gone there to see. He had introduced me
to Mark Twain, and I had come away with feelings that were no less
in intensity I am sure than those with which Moses came down out of
Mount Horeb. And Steffens and I celebrated them and their writings and
that quality of right-mindedness they both got into their writings,
and we had our joy in their perfect Americanism. The word had a
definite meaning for us; it occurred to us at that time because of
some tremendous though unavailing blows which Mark Twain had delivered
against our government’s policy in the Philippines, the time falling
in that era of khaki imperialism which opened in this land with the
Spanish war and too much reading of Kipling, who, if I could bring
myself to think that literature has any influence in America, might
be said to have induced us to imitate England in her colonial policy.
There comes back the picture of Mark Twain as he sat on the veranda of
the home he had that summer at Sewell’s Bridge, a cottage on a hill
all hidden among the pines; he sat there in his picturesque costume
of white trousers and blue jacket, with his splendid plume of white
hair, and he smoked cigar after cigar--he was an “end to end smoker”
as George Ade says--and as he sat and smoked he drawled a delightful
monologue about some of his experiences with apparitions and telepathy
and that weird sort of thing; he said they were not to be published
during his life, and since his death I have been waiting to see them
in print. He had just been made a Doctor of Laws by some university
in June of that year, a distinguishing fact known to a caller from
the fashionable resort of York near by, who, though somewhat hazy as
to Mark Twain’s performances in literature, nevertheless scrupulously
addressed him as “Doctor,” and every time he was thus recognized in
his new and scholarly dignity, he winked at us from under his shaggy
brows. Perhaps that was part of his Americanism, too, unless it were a
part of that universality which made him the great humorist he was,
and philosopher, too; an universality that makes Mr. Howells a humorist
as well as a novelist and a philosopher--the elements are scarcely
inseparable--though Mr. Howells’s humor is of a more delicate quality
than that of his great friend, and, as one might say, colleague, a
quality so rare and delicate and delightful that some folk seem to
miss it altogether. Perhaps it was the Americanism of these two great
men and their democracy that have won them such recognition in Europe,
where they have represented the best that is in us.

I speak of their democracy for the purpose of likening it in its
very essence to that of Golden Rule Jones and of Johnson, too, and
of all the others who have struggled in the human cause. We owe Mr.
Howells especially a debt in this land. He jeopardized his standing
as an artist, perhaps, by his polemics in the cause of realism in the
literary art, but he was the first to look about him and recognize his
own land and his own people in his fiction; that is why it is so very
much the life of our land as we know it, and to me there came long ago
a wonderful and consoling lesson, when in reading after him, and after
Tolstoy and Tourgenieff, and Flaubert, and Zola, and Valdez, and Thomas
Hardy, I discovered that people are all alike, and like all those about
us in every essential.

Lincoln Steffens did not miss the humor in Mr. Howells’s writing,
because he could not miss the humor in anything, though there was
not so much humor perhaps in another writer whom we had just then
discovered and were celebrating that day in the joy of our discovery.
It was to me a discovery of the greatest charm, a charm that lasts to
this day in everything the man has written, that charm of the sea and
of ships, the romance and poetry of it all which I had felt ever since
as a boy I found a noble friend in Gus Wright, an old sailor whose name
I cannot speak even now without a quickening of the spirit because of
the glamour that invested him when I sat and looked at him and realized
that he had hunted whales in the South Pacific and had sailed the Seven
Seas. I wish I had written him into the first of these papers, where he
belongs; he made two miniature vessels for me, one a full rigged ship,
the other a bark--dismantled now, both of them, alas, and long since
out of commission....

“You go down to the wharves along the East River,” Steffens was saying,
“and you’ll see a ship come in, and after she has been made fast to
her wharf, an old man will come out of the cabin, light his pipe, and
lean over the taffrail; he’ll have a brown, weather-beaten face, and
as he leans there smoking slowly and peacefully, his voyage done, his
eye roving calmly about here and there, you’ll look at him, and say to
yourself, ‘Those eyes have seen everything in this world!’”

It was a rather big thought when you dwelt on it.

“He’s seen everything in the world,” Steffens went on, “but he can’t
tell what he’s seen. Now Conrad has those eyes, he has seen everything,
and he can tell it.”

It was Joseph Conrad, of course, of whom we were talking, the great
Pole who even then had come to a mastery of our language that might
shame most of his contemporary writers in it. I would not give “Lord
Jim” for all the other sea stories that were ever written, not even
if all the novels of Cooper and Scott and Stevenson and Dickens were
thrown in. For Joseph Conrad can see all that the old sailor Steffens
was imagining that day could see, and far more besides; he can see
into the human soul. He had not written “Lord Jim” at that time, or if
he had, I had not read it, nor had Steffens written his books about
municipal government, to get back to the subject; too often, I fear,
have I been thinking about some book of Joseph Conrad when I should
have been thinking of municipal government.

I did not know much about municipal government in those days, except
what I had learned in Jones’s campaigns and that theoretical knowledge
I had obtained in the courts as his attorney, and I had, I fear, the
same indifference to the subject most of our citizens have. I should
have preferred any time to talk about literature and I should prefer to
do so now, since that is really so much more interesting and important.
But the fact that we knew nothing about it in those days was not
unusual; nobody knew much about it except that Mr. James Bryce had said
that it was the most conspicuous failure of the American Commonwealth,
and we quoted this observation so often that one might have supposed we
were proud of the distinction. Certainly few in America in those days
understood the subject in the sense in which it is understood in some
of the British cities, like Glasgow, for instance, whose municipal
democracy is so far ahead of ours, or in the German cities where
municipal administration is veritably a science. But in Steffens’s case
a lack of knowledge was in itself a qualification, since he had eyes,
like the old sailor, and, like Joseph Conrad, the power to tell what he
saw. That is, Steffens had vision, imagination, and if the history of
the city in America is ever written he will fill a large place on its
page.

I marvel when I reflect that he could see so clearly what most had
not even the sensitiveness to feel. He went at his task quite in the
scientific spirit, isolating first that elementary germ or microbe, the
partizan, the man who always voted the straight ticket in municipal
elections, the most virulent organism that ever infested the body
politic and as unconscious of its toxic power as the bacillus of yellow
fever. Then he discovered the foul culture this organism blindly
breeds--the political machine, with its boss. But he went on and his
quest led him to the public service corporation, the street railway
company, the gas company, the electricity company, and then his trail
led him out into the state, and he produced a series of studies of
politics in the American cities which has never been equaled, and so
had a noble and splendid part in the great awakening of our time.

As long as his writings exposed only the low and the vulgar
politicians, ward heelers and bosses, and the like, he was quite
popular; I believe he was even asked to deliver addresses before clubs
of the _dilettante_, and even in churches, for the righteous were
terrible in their wrath. But when he went more deeply, when he exposed
the respectable connections of the machine politicians, some of his
admirers fell away, and stood afar off, like certain disciples of old.
The citizen was delighted when some city other than his own was under
the scrutiny of the sharp eyes that gleamed behind those round glasses,
but when he drew near for a local study, there was an uplifting of
the hands in pious horror. Cincinnati applauded the exposure of
Minneapolis, and St. Louis was pleased to have Philadelphia reformed.
Reform is popular so long as someone else is to be reformed.




XXIX


Steffens came to Toledo occasionally, and I recall an evening when we
sat in my library and he told me of a certain editor with whom he had
been talking; the editor had been praising his work with a fervor that
filled Steffens with despair.

“Must I write up every city in the United States before they will see?”
he said. “If I were to do Toledo, how that chap would berate me!”

He came to Toledo early in his investigations, and I took him to see
Jones, and as we left the City Hall in the late afternoon of that
spring day, Steffens was somehow depressed; we had walked a block in
St. Clair Street in silence when he said:

“Why, that man’s program will take a thousand years!”

It did seem long to wait. There was a time when I thought it might be
done in a shorter period, but I have found myself under the necessity
of extending the term from time to time. I fear now that Steffens’s
estimate of the length of Jones’s program was rather short, but I know
of no other way that the program can be carried out. Steffens himself
is not so impatient now; he learned much more about our cities than he
ever wrote or dared to write, much no doubt that he could not write.
Great as was the data he collected, before all the conclusions could
be drawn, all the general rules deduced, it would be necessary to have
the data of all life, of which the cities are microcosms. The subject,
after all, is rather large.

But to some it seemed simple enough; were there not policemen patroling
their beats ready to arrest the bad people? Thus in the early days of
the awakening in America impatience took on the form it always takes
with us, and men flew to the old idols of our race, the constable and
the policeman; someone must be hounded down, someone must be put in
prison. This was the form which the awakening took in many places, and
many reputations were built up in that wretched work, and perhaps the
inadequacy of the work is best demonstrated by the instability of the
reputations. I suppose that such efforts do accomplish something, even
though it be at such fearful cost; they may educate some, but mostly
they seem to me to gratify a taste for cheap sensation and reward that
prurient curiosity which has always made the contemplation of sin so
very fascinating to our race. The reformer was abroad, seeking to make
mankind over, but since he has no model more attractive than himself to
offer, his work never goes very far, and he returns to his warfare on
the cigarette, or in moments of greater courage, on the poor girl whose
figure flits by in the darkness, followed by the reformer’s devouring
eye.

But Steffens did not write us up, as the reporters phrase it. I think
Jones perplexed him in those first days, though he knows now that
Jones was wholly and I had almost said solely right. Jones indeed
perplexed most of us. A man with a program of a thousand years could
not be expected to interest so vitally our impatient democracy, as
would one with a program so speedy and simple that it involved nothing
more complex than putting all the bad people in jail; and there was
always someone ready to point out the bad people, so that it seemed
simple, as well it might to those who had forgotten that even that
program is six thousand years old, at least, according to Archbishop
Ussher’s chronology. Steffens, however, was seeking types and in the
two leading cities of Ohio he found them so perfect that he need
never have gone further--had it not been for people like that fellow
citizen of ours who filled Steffens with such despair. But while he
was gathering his data on Cincinnati and on Cleveland he came to see
us often, to our delight, and continued to come, so that he knew our
city and our politics almost better than we knew them ourselves. He
went to Cleveland, I remember, with some distinct prejudice against
Tom Johnson; the prejudice so easily imbibed in gentlemen’s clubs. But
I was delighted when, after his investigation, he wrote that story
in _McClure’s_ which characterized Tom Johnson as the best mayor of
the best governed city in the United States. I was delighted because
I was flattered in my own opinion, because I was fond of Tom Johnson,
and because it appeared just in the nick of time to turn the tide in
Johnson’s third campaign.

Jones was delighted, too; he had said almost immediately after Johnson
became mayor of Cleveland that he “loved him” because, in appointing
the Reverend Harris R. Cooley as Director of Charities and Corrections,
Johnson selected a man who began at once to parole prisoners from the
workhouse, and Jones and Johnson became friends as Johnson and Pingree
had been friends. It was a peculiar instance of the whimsical and
profligate generosity of the fates that the three cities grouped at the
western end of Lake Erie like those cities Walt Whitman saw, or thought
he saw, “as sisters with their arms around each others’ necks” should
have had about the same time three such mayors as Pingree in Detroit,
Johnson in Cleveland and Jones in Toledo, though the three men were
different in everything except their democracy.

Johnson’s success in Cleveland, obtained nominally as a Democrat,
though in his campaign he was as non-partizan as Jones himself, made
him the “logical” candidate of the Democrats in the state for governor,
and when he was nominated for that office he burst upon the old
Republican state like a new planet flaming in the heavens. Many of the
Democrats found that he was entirely too logical in his democracy,
since he was as like as not to denounce a Democratic office holder as
any other. He went forth to his campaign that year in his big French
touring car, a way entirely new to us, and in the car he went from
town to town, holding his immense meetings in a circus tent which was
taken down and sent on ahead each night. In this way he was entirely
independent of local committees, and they did not like that very well;
it had been his wealth more than his democracy that had made him seem
so logical as a candidate to some of the Democrats. Such a spectacle
had not been seen on our country roads as that great touring car
made; it was a red car, and the newspapers called it “the red devil”;
sometimes they were willing to apply the epithet to its occupant. It
was inevitable, of course, that provincialism should criticize him for
having bought his car in France instead of the home market, and I shall
never forget, so irresistible in retort was he, the instant reply he
made:

“That complaint comes in very bad grace from you protectionists. I
bought my car in France it is true and paid $5,000 for it, but I paid
you $3,000 more in tariff duties to let me bring it home. You made me
pay for it twice and I think I own it now.”

Few have ever been vilified or abused as Johnson was abused in our
state that year; his red car might have been a chariot of flame driven
by an anarchist, from the way some of the people talked. Strange,
inexplicable hatred in humanity for those who love it most! Tom Johnson
campaigned that year on a platform which demanded a two-cent-a-mile
railway fare and the taxation of railroad property at something like
its value, or at least, he said the railroads should pay in taxes as
much, relatively, as a man paid on his home; the poor man was paying on
more than a sixty per cent. valuation while the railways were valued
at eighteen or twenty per cent. This was dangerous, even revolutionary
doctrine, of course, and Johnson was a single-taxer, supposed in
Ohio to be a method of taxation whereby everybody would be relieved
of taxation except the farmers who were to be taxed according to the
superficial area of their farms. And of course Johnson was defeated,
and yet within two years the legislature enacted the first of these
proposals into law with but one dissenting vote. Thus heresy becomes
orthodoxy. The proposal for taxation reform still waits, and will wait,
I fancy, for years, since it is so fundamental, and mankind never
attacks fundamental problems until it has exhausted all the superficial
ones. And yet, while many other changes he contended for in his day
have been made, while many of his heresies have become orthodoxies,
the fear of him possessed the rural mind in the legislature until his
death, and almost any measure could be defeated by merely uttering the
formula “Tom Johnson.”




XXX


One remembers one’s friends in various attitudes, and I see Tom
Johnson now standing on the platform in the old tent, under the
flaring lights, with the eager crowd before him--there were never
such intelligent audiences to speak to as those in Cleveland, unless
it were those in Toledo--and he was at his best when the crowd was
heckling him. He was like Severus Cassius, who, as Montaigne says,
“spoke best extempore, and stood more obliged to fortune than his own
diligence; it was an advantage to him to be interrupted in speaking,
and his adversaries were afraid to nettle him, lest his anger redouble
his eloquence.” He voluntarily introduced the custom of heckling so
prevalent in England and Scotland, because at first he was not a
proficient speaker; he was so simple, so direct, so positive, that
he could state his position in a very few words. Thus, as he told me
once, his speeches were too short for the customary political meeting
in a state where political oratory flowed on and on indefinitely, and
he asked the crowd to put questions to him. This stirred him up, put
him on his mettle, stimulated his thought, and he was best at this
short range. And no one ever got the better of him. Once an opponent
triumphantly demanded, in a campaign in which Johnson’s administration
was charged with extravagance:

“Mr. Johnson, is it not a fact that under your administration the
Cleveland workhouse has lost money?”

“Yes, sir,” the Mayor replied promptly.

“How do you explain that?”

“We are not trying to make money in the Cleveland workhouse,” the Mayor
replied instantly, “we are trying to make MEN!”

Or again I see him, superintending the tearing up of street railway
tracks, on streets where the franchises of the private company had
expired, to make room for the rails of the city company, calmly smoking
a cigar, and with a gesture of his expressive delicate white hand
waving aside the latest of the many injunctions that were sued out
against him. The battle was never lost to him, though his followers
were often discouraged. He might have said of court injunctions as
Napoleon said of bullets at the battle of Krasnoi:

“Bah! They have been whistling about our legs these forty years!”

But I see him best I think in the great hall of his home in Euclid
Avenue, one short, fat leg tucked comfortably under him, his cigar
in his aristocratic hand, his friends and admirers about him. It was
a remarkable coterie of brilliant young men. One of them had been
originally an opponent, one of those who heckled him in the tent, a
fiery young radical not long since a blacklisted mechanic who had
gone hungry when on strike, Peter Witt, one of the most picturesque
personalities in Ohio politics; he became one of Johnson’s intimate
friends and strongest supporters, and a splendid speaker on the stump.
He was city clerk of Cleveland under all the Johnson administrations
and is now the street railway commissioner of that city under Mayor
Newton D. Baker, who, as city solicitor, was another of the group of
those happy days. Mr. Baker was like a boy in appearance, with his
sensitive face and the ideals of a poet, and a brilliant lawyer. He
carried all the legal burden of the long street railway controversy in
Cleveland,--it was almost a civil war--and did it all with such skill
and ability, and withal with such grace and courtesy and good nature
that he never offended his opponents, who were the leading corporation
lawyers of the city. Frederic C. Howe had been elected to the council
in Cleveland as a Republican from one of the most aristocratic wards,
but he was won over by Johnson’s personality, was renominated by
Johnson on the Democratic ticket, afterwards sent to the state senate
and became one of the foremost men in the liberal movement in America;
his books on municipal government are authorities. And Dr. Cooley; he
was a Disciple preacher, and Johnson placed him at the head of the
department of charities and corrections, so that, as Johnson used
to say, instead of a preacher Dr. Cooley became a minister. It was
delightful to be with them in those gatherings. The genuine reform of
conditions in that city possessed them all like a passion; they were
stimulated by a common ambition, which was, as Johnson used to say,
to make Cleveland a city set on a hill, and though he was not a poet
nor a maker of phrases everyone instinctively knew what he meant when
he spoke of his city set on a hill. I do not know how much of history
he had read, but he knew intuitively that the city in all ages has
been the outpost of civilization, and that if the problem of democracy
is to be solved at all it is to be solved first in the city. That
was why he struggled for the free city, struggled to make the city
democratic; he knew that the cure for the ills of democracy is not
less democracy, as so many were always preaching, but more democracy.
And how delighted he was when Fred Howe brought out his book “The City
the Hope of Democracy.” He had the joy of seeing marshaled there in the
thesis of a scholar all the arguments he had apprehended but had never
reduced to terms; there they were, all in their logical order--and
Johnson straightway sent a copy of the book to every member of the Ohio
legislature, to their amazement no doubt, if not to their amusement.

I used to like to go over to Cleveland and meet that charming group
Johnson had gathered about him. There was in them a spirit I never saw
in such fullness elsewhere; they were all working for the city, they
thought only of the success of the whole. They had the city sense, a
love of their town like that love which undergraduates have for their
university, the _esprit de corps_ of the crack regiment.

But Johnson used to set me to work with the rest of them. I went over
there once to spend the week’s end, for rest and relaxation, and he had
me working far into three nights on amendments to the municipal code.
He had terrible energy, but it was a joy to work with him. I wish I had
gone oftener.

I have said enough I hope to make it clear that Tom Johnson was one
of those mortals who have somehow been lifted above their fellows far
enough to catch a vision of the social order which people generally
as yet do not see. It was inevitable, of course, that such a man,
especially since he was a rich man, should have his motives impugned,
and I recall now with what a confidential chuckle he said to me one
time when he had been accused of I know not what vaulting and wicked
ambition:

“I am politically ambitious; I have just one ambition; I want to be the
mayor of a free city, and if I were, the very first thing I should do
would be to appoint a corps of assessors who couldn’t see a building,
or an improvement; they would assess for taxation nothing but the value
of the land, and we would try out the single tax.”

He did not realize that ambition of course; no one ever realizes his
ambition. But he did perhaps more than any other man in America to make
possible the coming of the free city in this land.

His struggle for three-cent railway fares in Cleveland, which was but a
roundabout method of securing municipal ownership in a state where the
legislature in those days would not permit cities to own their public
utilities was his great work. He lived to see that successful in a way,
though not exactly in the way he had expected; that is another irony
which the fates visit on the head of ambitious men.

And yet that irony of the fates is not always, after all, unkind.
Somehow, after a while, in the lengthened perspective, the broadened
vision that reveals a larger segment of the arc, the event is seen in
better proportion. It requires faith in one’s cause to see this always,
and Johnson always had that faith. I shall not forget how when the
people at last voted against him, he still could smile, and say to me:
“The people are probably right.” It was the last time I saw him. He
was sick then, and dying, and sadly changed; the hair that had been
so black and curly that summer morning long before, had grown thin and
white; the face, sadly lined with weariness, was sublimated by a new
expression. There was the same courage in the classic profile, and the
old smile was there. He was writing his memoirs with a courage as grim
as that of General Grant--and he had the equanimity of Antoninus Pius.
And on his countenance there was the expression of a purified ideal. So
he had won; his was the victory after all.




XXXI


The best of life, no doubt, is made up of memories, as M. George Cain
says, and perhaps that is why I have lingered so long over these little
incidents of Sam Jones and Tom Johnson. I have told them in no sort of
related order; Jones died years before Johnson; but somehow they seem
to me to have appeared simultaneously, like twin stars in our northern
sky, to have blazed a while and then gone out together. Different as
their personalities were, different as two such great originals must
have been, they were one in ideal, and even in their last words they
expressed the vast toil and strain of the efforts they put forth to
attain it.

“Was it worth while?” asked Tom Johnson of his friend Newton Baker, a
day or two before he died. And Sam Jones on that last day turned to his
sister Nell, the noble spirit who had conducted the settlement work at
Golden Rule House, and said:

“‘He that endureth to the end----’ What does it say?”

She repeated the Scripture to him.

“Say it in Welsh,” he said, his thought returning in those ultimate
moments to the speech they had used as children. But before she could
direct her mind into the old sequences, the end had come.

At least, there were those in town who thought it was the end. The
stock of the street railway company went up twenty-four points the
next morning, and some brokers issued a letter saying now that
Jones had died the securities of that enterprise offered a golden
investment--about the most authentic extant illustration, I suppose, of
the utter contemptibility of privilege in these states. The politicians
often had been heard to say that when Jones retired the non-partizan
movement in Toledo would come to an end; in their professional analyses
they had pronounced it a personal following not governed by principle,
and that with the passing of the leader it would disappear and the
voters become tractable and docile partizan automata again. And now
that Jones was dead and one of their organization, the president of the
council, was to succeed to the mayor’s office, the hopes they had so
long entertained seemed at last on the point of realisation. Within a
few weeks, therefore, an ordinance granting the street railway company
a renewal of its rights was passed by the council.

Then, instantly, the old spirit flamed anew; there were editorials,
mass meetings, and all sorts of protest against the action, and in
response to this indignant public feeling, the acting mayor, Mr.
Robert H. Finch, very courageously vetoed the ordinance. But the
machine “had the votes,” and on the following Monday night the council
met to pass the ordinance over the veto. The members of the Republican
organization were there, favored with seats in the office of the city
clerk; lobbyists and the legal representatives of the street railway
company were there. The chamber was crowded; the hot air of the small,
low-ceiled room was charged with a nervous tension; there was in it an
eager expectant quality, not unmixed with dread and fear and guilt. The
atmosphere was offensive to the moral sense--a condition remarked in
other halls in this land when councils and legislatures have been about
to take action that was inimical to the public good.

But the machine councilmen bore themselves jauntily enough; the windows
were open to the soft night of the early autumn, and now and then some
one sauntered in nonchalance over to the windows, and looked down
into St. Clair Street, garish in the white and brilliant light of
the electric signs of theaters, restaurants and saloons. The theater
crowds were already going by, but it was to be noted that they loitered
that evening, and were reënforced by other saunterers, as though the
entertainment of the pavement might surpass that of the painted scene
within. And above all the noises of the street, clanged the gongs of
the street cars gliding by, and, for the moment, as a dramatic center
of the scene, a squad of policemen was stationed in the lobby of the
council chamber.

This nervous, sinister mood was somehow abroad in the whole city that
night. Mr. Negley D. Cochran had written another editorial, published
that evening in heavy type, in the _News-Bee_, calling on the citizens
to come out and protect their rights in the streets of their city, so
that there were apprehensions of all sorts of danger and disaster.

The council proceeded with its business; the voice of the reading
clerk droned on in the resolutions and ordinances that represented the
normal municipal activities of that hour, and then, suddenly, a sound
of a new and unaccustomed sort arose from St. Clair Street, the sound
of the tramp of marching men. Those at the windows, looking out, saw
a strange spectacle--not without its menace; the newspaper reporters,
some of them, embellished their reports with old phrases about faces
blanching. Perhaps they did; they might well have done so, for the men
came down St. Clair Street not as a mob; they were silent, marching in
column, by sets of fours, with an orderly precision and a discipline
almost military. And at their head there was a man whose square, broad
shoulders and firm stride were the last expression of determination.
He wore a slouch hat, under which his gray hair showed; his closely
trimmed beard was grizzled; he looked, as many noted, not unlike the
conventional portraits of General Grant. The man was Mr. Johnson
Thurston, and he was as grim as General Grant, as brave, as determined,
and as cool. He was widely known in Toledo as a lawyer, however, not
as a politician; he had never been in politics, indeed, but he was in
politics that night, surely, and destined to remain in politics for
years to come.

He brought his column to a halt under the windows of the council
chamber. There was no room in that small chamber for such a delegation,
or seemingly for any delegation of the people, however small. Johnson
Thurston’s son marched beside him as an aide, bearing a soap box--the
modern tribune of our democracy--and he placed it on the pavement for
his father. A street car, just then halting, clanged its gong for the
throng to make way, and at this perfect symbol of the foe they were
opposing, Johnson Thurston shook his fist, and shouted:

“Stand there! The people are attending to their business to-night!”

The street car stood, and Johnson Thurston mounted his soap box,
produced a paper and read from it in a loud voice that section of
the Constitution in which the people retain to themselves the right
peaceably to assemble and petition for a redress of grievances. And
this done, he turned to his followers, gave them a signal, and there
went up from their throats in perfect unison a mighty cry: “Let the
franchise alone!”

Three times they voiced their imperative mandate, and then, at a
signal, they wheeled about, and marched away in the excellent order
in which they had come. Such a demonstration, in the streets, at
night, before a legislative body, had it occurred in a capital or in a
metropolis, would have been historic. As it was, the cry that went up
from those men was heard in the council chamber; and it was destined
to ring through the town for the better part of a decade. The council
did not pass the ordinance over the Mayor’s veto; half an hour later
the councilmen were escorted from their chamber by the police they had
summoned; and a sadly shaken body they were, poor fellows.

Meanwhile the men who had marched with Johnson Thurston had retired
to a vacant storeroom in Superior Street, three blocks away, over
the door of which there was a canvas sign bearing the inscription
“INDEPENDENT HEADQUARTERS.” There they had assembled and been drilled
by Johnson Thurston, as college men are drilled by a leader in their
yells, and with a solemn sense of civic duty they had marched to the
council chamber to save their city from a quarter of a century more
of shameful vassalage to a privileged public utility corporation. The
threat of their presence had been sufficient, but had that proved
unavailing, they had provided other resources. There had been all the
while, from the hour of the opening of the doors that night, twelve
men in the council chamber, armed with bombs, not of dynamite or any
such anarchist explosive, but of asafœtida and sulphureted hydrogen
and I know not what other overpowering fumes and odors, confidently
relied upon to prevail against even so foul a stench as that which a
privileged plutocracy can make in any of the halls of government when
it has determined to secure another lease of its tenure.

At Independent Headquarters, then, that autumn, political meetings were
held, in which local affairs--the street-car situation especially
and the relation it bore to the machines of political parties--were
discussed. Because of those changes the legislature was always
making in the government of cities, three councilman at large were
to be elected. This was in the year 1904, in the midst of a national
campaign. Roosevelt was running for president for his second--or his
first term, depending on the point of view--and three of those men who
had voted for that street railway ordinance, and were ready to vote to
pass it over the mayor’s veto, were candidates on the Republican ticket
for councilmen at large. The Independents who had marched with Johnson
Thurston determined to nominate a city ticket, and they honored me by
offering me the place at the head of that ticket as their candidate
for councilman at large. I was writing another novel just then and
battling as usual against interruptions, and so I begged off; it was
not the campaign I feared, but, as I told them, the fear that I should
be elected. We nominated a ticket, and went into the campaign, speaking
every night, and in November, though Roosevelt carried the city by
fifteen thousand, our candidates for councilmen at large were elected.
Clearly, then, the non-partizan movement had not wholly died with
Golden Rule Jones; his soul, like the soul of John Brown, was marching
on, and still somehow led by him, and inspired by his spirit, there had
sprung forth, like Greek soldiers from the dragon’s teeth, in Toledo
a democratic municipal movement. First of all the cities in America,
she had taken the initial step in freeing herself, the step all
cities in America must take if they would free themselves from their
masters--that of non-partizan municipal elections.




XXXII


The predilection of the Ohio man for politics, I believe, is well
known in this land, where it is generally identified with a love for
office. There is a reproach implied in the reputation which we perhaps
deserve. An Ohio man goes into politics as naturally as a Nova Scotian
goes to sea, and yet not all Nova Scotians go to sea. They all love
the sea perhaps, but they do not all care to become sailors. And so
with us Ohioans. We all love politics, though fortunately we do not
all care to hold office, even if most people do smile indulgently
when the modest disinclination is expressed. Perhaps such scepticism
is quite natural in a land so saturated in privilege that even office
holding is regarded in that light--or was until recently, for now a
new conception is expanding in the public consciousness and there is
hope that ere long public office will be regarded as a responsibility.
I was quite sure that I did not care to be a councilman--that weekly
wrangle, by night, in a room choking with the fumes of cheap tobacco,
known as the session of the common council, was far from my tastes. And
when the mayoralty was suggested to me I was quite as certain that I
did not wish that. For it was not long after the death of Jones that
it was suggested; by Tom Johnson for one, who, in his blunt way, told
me that I should run for the place; and by Steffens, who, just then in
Cleveland, was writing the article in which Tom Johnson was celebrated
as “the best mayor of the best governed city in America,” and Steffens
found time now and then to come over to Toledo to see us. “And another
thing,” he wrote to me after one of these visits, “you’ll have to run
for mayor.” He reached this conclusion, I believe, by a process of
inversion. He had been talking with some of the machine politicians,
and it was their objection to me as a candidate that caused him to
see my duty in that light. I was at one with them on that point, at
any rate; they could have been no more reluctant to have me run than
I myself was. Tom Johnson, when the Democrats met in their state
convention at Columbus that year, might propose me for governor, and
the delegation of his county, Cuyahoga, and the delegation from my own
county of Lucas vote for my nomination, but that stroke of political
lightning was easily arrested by rods that had been more accurately and
carefully adjusted, so that I could take the manuscript of “The Turn of
the Balance” and go to Wequetonsing on the shores of Little Traverse
Bay, where the days are blue and gold, and there is sparkling sunshine,
and a golf links where one may find happiness, if he is on his game,
or if he is not, consolation in that noble view from the hill--the tee
at the old fourth and the new twelfth hole--when he may, if he wish,
imagine himself in Italy overlooking the Bay of Naples--which is no
more beautiful. Meredith Nicholson, a hale old Hoosier friend, as James
Whitcomb Riley used to phrase it, was there, too, near the spot where
he wrote that excellent novel, “The Main Chance,” and in that country
place with him and other charming friends near by I spent the summer.
But when I came home in the autumn the campaign was already on, and the
Independents had all but nominated me as their candidate for mayor.

They were forced to make their nominations by petition, and on the
petitions proposing me for the office there were many thousands of
names, pages that were stained with the grime and dust and grease of
factories and shops--a diploma in its way, which might have made one
proud, had not the prospect been one to make one so very unhappy. For
I knew what the mayoralty had done to Jones. I had come to realize in
my association with him that there is no position more difficult than
that of the mayor of a large city in the America of our times, for
the city is a kind of microcosm where are posited in miniature all
the problems of a democracy, and the fact that they are in miniature
only increases the difficulty. My ambitions lay in another field,
and besides I had a feeling against it, dim and vague, though since
adequately expressed in one of those fine generalizations which Señor
Guglielmo Ferrero makes on his brilliant page; “there is no sphere of
activity,” he says, writing of the perils of political life, “which is
so much at the mercy of unforeseen accidents or where the effort put
out is so incommensurable with the result obtained.” It is, of course,
one of the privileges of the citizen in a democracy to be “mentioned”
for public office; if no one else mentions him he can mention himself,
and whenever someone else does mention him there are many who ascribe
to his originality the credit for the suggestion.

It seems difficult for our people to understand any man who really does
not desire public office in a land where it has so long been regarded
purely as a privilege to be bestowed or a prize to be contested. I
suppose that even the blunt and grim old warrior Sherman caused the
people to smile when he said that if nominated for the presidency he
would not accept and if elected he would not serve. They wondered what
he meant, and for a time it never occurred to them that he meant just
what he said.

But the day came at last when I must decide, and to a committee of the
Independents I said that I should give them an answer in the morning.
I thought it all over again in the watches of the night,--and the
unfinished manuscript on my library table--and at last, since somebody
had to do it, since somebody had to point out at least the danger of
risking the community rights in the hands of a political machine, I
said I would accept. I suppose that it is but an expression of that
ironic mood in which the Fates delight to deal with mortals that it
should be so easy to get that which one does not want; the Independents
insisted on my standing for the office, but the only humor in that
fact was just then too grim for pleasure, though there is always a
compensation somewhere after all, and gloomy as I was that morning at
the prospect of the bitter campaign and the difficulties that would
follow if I were elected, I could laugh when “Dad” McCullough, the
old Scotsman whom we all loved for himself and for his devotion to
our movement, leaned forward in his chair, stroked his whiskers in a
mollifying way and, as though he preferred even the other members of
his committee not to hear him, said:

“Would it be out of place if I suggested that in the campaign you bear
down as lightly as possible on the infirmities of the law?”

His shrewd sense even then warned him of the herring that would be
drawn across the trail of privilege as soon as we struck it!

And he was right. We had not opened our campaign at Golden Rule Hall,
before privilege did what it always does when it is pursued, it tried
to divert attention from itself by pointing out a smaller evil. All
the old and conventional complaints about the morals of the city to
which we had been used in Jones’s campaigns were revived and repeated
with embellishments and improvements; no city was ever reviled as was
ours by those who had failed in their efforts to control it and absorb
the product of its communal toil. My attitude, conceived by “Dad”
McCullough as “bearing down on the infirmities of the law,” was now
represented as evidence of an intention to ignore the law, to enforce
none of the statutes, and it was predicted that the election of the
Independent ticket meant nothing but anarchy and chaos.

To this “moral” issue that had served for so many years, the “good”
people responded immediately, as they always do, and with certain
of the clergy to lead them rallied instantly about the machine, and
for six weeks reveled in an inspection of all the city’s vices, and
mouseled in the slums and stews of the tenderloin for examples of the
depravity which they declared it was the purpose and design of the
Independents to intensify and perpetuate. Their own candidate had
been in power for a year and a half and these conditions had existed
unmolested, but when some of our speakers indicated this inconsistency
in their attitude they only raged the more.

But notwithstanding all this, the issue was clear; the machine had
helped to make it clear, not only by its long opposition to Jones, but
more recently by its efforts for the street railway company. It was the
old issue between privilege and democracy, that has marked the cleavage
in society in all ages. The people were trying to take back their own
government, for the purpose, first, of preventing the street railway
company from securing another lease of the city’s streets for a quarter
of a century, by which, incidentally, the company would realize profits
on about twenty-five million dollars of watered stock. But the people
were not to be deceived; they were not to be turned off the trail so
easily; and the entire ticket was elected, so that at the beginning of
that new year the Independents were in control of every branch of the
government, not only in the city, but in the county as well.




XXXIII


I have spoken of the Independents as though they were an authentic
political party, when it was one of their basic principles to be
no party at all. They were Republicans and Democrats who, in the
revelation of Jones’s death, had come to see that it was the partizan
that was responsible for the evil political machines in American
cities; they saw that by dividing themselves arbitrarily into parties,
along national lines, by voting, almost automatically, their party
tickets, ratifying nominations made for them they knew not how, they
were but delivering over their city to the spoiler. As Republicans,
proud of the traditions of that party, they had voted under the
impression that they were voting for Lincoln; as Democrats they thought
they were voting for Jefferson, or at least for Jackson, but they had
discovered that they had been voting principally for the street railway
company and the privileges allied with it in interest.

And more than all, they saw that in the amazing superstition of party
regularity by which the partizan mind in that day was obsessed, they
were voting for these interests no matter which ticket they supported,
for the machine was not only partizan, it was bipartizan, and the
great conflict they waged at the polls was the most absurd sham battle
that ever was fought. It seems almost incredible now that men’s minds
were ever so clouded, strange that they did not earlier discover
how absurd was a system which, in order to enable them the more
readily to subjugate themselves, actually printed little wood-cuts of
birds--roosters and eagles--at the heads of the tickets, so that they
might the more easily and readily recognize their masters and deliver
their suffrages over to them. It is an absurdity that is pretty well
recognized in this country to-day, and the principle of separating
municipal politics from national politics is all but established in
law. Mr. James Bryce had pointed it out long before, but Jones seemed
to be almost the first among us to recognize it, and he probably
had not read from Mr. Bryce; he deduced the principle from his own
experience, and from his own consciousness, if not his own conscience,
perhaps he had some intimation of it from the Genius of These States,
whose scornful laugh at that and other absurdities his great exemplar
Walt Whitman could hear, echoed as from some mountain peak afar in the
west. But it was no laughing matter in Toledo in those days. Men were
accused of treason and sedition for deserting their parties; it made
little difference which party a man belonged to; the insistence was on
his belonging to a party; any party would suffice.

I have no intention, however, of discussing that principle now, but it
was the point from which we had to start in our first campaign, the
point from which all cities will have to start if they wish to be free.
The task we faced was relatively greater than that which Jones had
faced; we had a full ticket in the field, a candidate for every city
office and a man running for the council in every ward in town. Jones
had run alone, and though he succeeded there was always a council and
a coterie of municipal officials who represented the other interest in
the community. Of course he had made our work possible by the labor
he had done, great pioneer that he was. He had been his own platform,
as any candidate after all must be, but with our large movement it
was necessary to reduce our principles to some form and we tried to
do this as simply as we could. We put forth our belief that local
affairs should be separate from, and independent of, party politics,
and that public officers should be selected on account of their honesty
and efficiency, regardless of political affiliations; that the people
should be more active in selecting their officials, and should not
allow an office-seeker to bring about his own nomination; that the
prices charged by public service corporations should be regulated by
the council at stated intervals; and that all franchises for public
utilities should first be submitted to a vote of the people, that the
city should possess the legal right to acquire and maintain any public
utility, when authorized so to do by direct vote of its people, that
every franchise granted to public service corporations should contain
an agreement that the city might purchase and take over its property
at a fair price, whenever so voted by the people, and that no street
railway franchise should be extended or granted, permitting more than
three-cent fares, and unless it includes provision for universal
transfers, satisfactory service, and reasonable compensation for the
use of bridges, and we demanded from the legislature home rule, the
initiative and referendum and the recall.

Perhaps it was not such a little platform after all, but big indeed,
I think, when one comes to consider its potentialities, and if anyone
thinks it was easy to put its principles into practice, let him try it
and see! It was drawn by that Johnson Thurston of whom I spoke, and
by Oren Dunham and by Elisha B. Southard and others, citizens devoted
to their town, and already with a prescience of the city spirit. They
succeeded in compressing into those few lines all we know or need to
know about municipal government, and ages hence our cities will still
be falling short of the ideal they expressed on that little card. There
were many who went with us in that first campaign who did not see all
the implications of that statement of principles; none of us saw all
of them of course. The movement had not only the strength but the
weaknesses of all so-called reform movements in their initial stages.
Those who were disappointed or disaffected or dissatisfied for personal
reasons with the old party machines, no doubt found an opportunity for
expression of their not too lofty sentiments, although later on when
they saw that it was merely a tendency toward democracy they fell away,
not because the movement had deserted its original ideals but because
they at last understood them.

As I now look back on that first campaign, on the experience I had so
much dreaded, the perspective has worked its magic, and the hardships
and difficulties have faded away, even, I hope, as its enmities have
faded away, though remembering Jones’s admonition to “draw the sting”
I tried to keep enmities out of it. Since I could not bring myself
to discuss myself, I resolved not to discuss my opponents, and I
went through the campaign without once mentioning the name of one of
them--there were four candidates for mayor against me--without making
one personal reference to them. And never in any political campaign
since have I attacked an opponent. It was enough to discuss the
principles of our little platform; and the first task was to get the
electors to see the absurdity of their partizanship and to make clear
the necessity of having a city government that represented the people
or, since that phrase is perhaps indefinite, one that did not represent
the privileged interests of the city.

The campaign was like the old Jones campaigns, though not altogether
like them.

The legislature, which is always interfering as much as possible with
the cities, had changed the time of holding the municipal elections
from the spring to the autumn, one change wrought by a legislature in
cities that the people approved, since instead of those raw spring
winds we now have the glorious weather the autumn usually brings us
in the lake regions, with a sparkling air and a warm sun, and a long
procession of golden days, on which one really should be playing golf,
if one could play golf in the midst of a political campaign, which one
could not, since art and politics, or at least the practice of them,
are wholly incompatible.

There was no old gray Molly to jog about from one meeting to another,
and if there had been, she could not have jogged fast enough for the
necessities of that hour; and we established new precedents when Percy
Jones, the son of the Golden Rule Mayor, drove me about at furious
speed in his big touring car, the “Grey Ghost” the reporters called
it, and it streaked through the night, with its siren singing, from
place to place until I had spoken at half a dozen meetings. Every day
at noon it wheeled up to the entrance of the factories and shops as the
men were coming out for their noon hour. And such meetings I believe
were never held anywhere; there was an inspiration as the men crowded
about the car to hear the speeches; they were not politicians, they
were seeking nothing, they were interested in their city; and in their
faces, what is far above any of these considerations, there was an
eager interest in life, perhaps a certain hunger of life which in so
many of them, such were the conditions of their toil, was not satisfied.




XXXIV


As I sat and looked out over the crowds that poured from the shops and
stood, sometimes for the whole of the noon hour, in discomfort perhaps
if the wind was off the lake, and saw the veritable hunger for life
that was in their faces, a hunger surely which no political or economic
system, however wise and perfect, could satisfy, I could not help
thinking that it was a pity the clergy did not understand these people
better, for, after all, the message of the Carpenter who came out of
Nazareth was for the workers and the poor, and He had passionately
thrown Himself on their side. It might have been suggested to that
pastor who complained bitterly that his own pews were empty on Sunday
evenings while the streets outside his church were crowded with people
who for one evening at least were joyous and free from care, that the
Master whom he served would have asked no better congregation than they
and no better auditorium than the street.

But this pastor was used to making suggestions, not to receiving
them; he was not of a mind as open as that one who actually came to
me once to ask me how he could get the workingmen to hear him preach.
He had not failed, he said, to go to them; he had advertised on a
placard hung at the entrance of a factory where two thousand men were
working that on a Monday at noon he would speak to them. They had
known of him, for he had recently been celebrated in the newspapers as
having inaugurated a crusade to close the cheap theaters, whose lurid
melodramas,--I believe lurid is the word in that connection unless
the melodramas are “novelized” and sold for a dollar and a half,--he
said, were detrimental to morals, as no doubt they were. And so when
he appeared, punctually, on that Monday noon, at the rendezvous
appointed by his poster, the workingmen were ready and, when he stood
up to preach to them, they received him with a deafening din, made by
pounding on pieces of metal they had brought from the shop, so that
the poor fellow could not speak at all, and when, with roars of awful
laughter they unfurled some ribald banner fresh from the paint shop of
their establishment, advising him to go to hell where he was always
consigning so many of his fellow human beings, he went away quite
broken-hearted. It was in that mood and perhaps a little chastened
by his experience that he came to see me. I could agree with him, of
course, that the men had acted like the perfect barbarians they could
be at times, but there was nothing I could do for him, nothing I could
tell him. I learned long ago that you cannot tell a man anything unless
he knows it already!

And yet that preacher’s case was perfectly simple. He had come to
the city not long before, and of course, had come from the country.
His training and his experience had all been rural, he knew nothing
whatever of the life of our cities or of their problems; he thought
only in agrarian sequences. He had a little code of conduct consisting
of a few perfectly simple negatives, namely, men should not use
tobacco, or liquor, or attend theaters or circuses, or play with
colored cards, or violate (that is, do anything pleasant on) the
Sabbath day. And whenever he saw people doing any of these things it
was his duty to dissuade them from doing them, and if he could not
dissuade them, then it was the duty of the authorities to force the
people to stop doing these things by sending policemen after them.
Poverty was caused either by drink, or by idleness, though usually by
drink, and if the saloons were closed, drinking would cease!

This was the man’s conception. Of the condition of the workingmen in
the cities he had literally no notion. He knew they worked, and that
working made them tired, of course, just as it made farmers tired.
He saw no difference between the labor in the agricultural field and
that in the industrial field. That men who had been shut up in dusty
factories for six days, working intently at whirling machines, under
the bulb of an electric light, felt, when they came to the one day of
rest, that they should like to go outdoors and breathe the air, and
have some relaxation, some fun, had never occurred to him. That they
had to work so hard, too, that stimulants were perhaps a necessity,
never occurred to him, just as it had never occurred to him that
when one of these workers left home there was no place for him to go
unless he went to a saloon, where there were light and warmth and
companionship, and, above all, liberty; or to a cheap theatre or in the
summer to a baseball game. And he could not understand why these men
resented his suggestion that they give up all these things, and instead
do as farmers do on Sunday, or as they pretend to do, that is, stay
indoors, or, if they do go out, go out to attend church.

And what was most curious of all, he had not the slightest notion of
what we meant when we spoke of the street railway problem. He knew,
of course, that it was proposed to reduce the fare a cent or two
cents, but that was not important; what were two cents? That there
was anything immoral in watering stock, in seizing millions of the
communal value, had never occurred to him, and in the midst of all
the complexities of city life he remained utterly naïve, bound up in
his little code, with not the glimmer of a ray of light on social
conditions or problems, or of economics, or, in a word, of life. To
him there were no social problems that the Anti-Saloon League could
not solve in a week, if wicked officials would only give them enough
policemen and a free rein to do it.

And so he wondered why the workingmen would not come to hear him
preach, or at least would not listen to him at the door of their shop!

And most of the parsons in the town--at that time, though it is not
so any more, so rapidly have changes come in our thought--were of
this frame of mind. Not one of them supported our cause; many of them
denounced it, and continued to denounce it, for years. Now and then
there was one who might whisper to me privately that he understood
and favored our efforts, but not one ever spoke out publicly, unless
it were to denounce us. And several times they attacked me in their
prayers. For instance, if--after I became mayor--I went to deliver
an address of welcome, and a preacher was there to open the assembly
with prayer, he sometimes would take advantage of the situation and,
in the pretense of asking a blessing on the “chief magistrate of our
beloved city,” point out my short-comings and read me a lecture on
my duties with his eyes shut and his hands folded. To that attack it
would have been necessary, I presume, though I am not quite sure of
the ecclesiastical etiquette, to reply with my eyes shut and my hands
folded, but Jones had said: “When He was reviled, He reviled not
again,” and “He that endureth to the end.” It seemed as good a plan
as any. I never replied to these or any other of their attacks. Some
of the leaders of our movement always insisted that the preachers
opposed us because they were influenced, according to the historical
precedents, by their economic dependence on the privileged class. But
if that is true I am sure the influence was unconscious in most cases,
and that they simply did not understand. They were all desperately
sincere. That was the chief difficulty with them.

Indeed, I found it better never to reply to any criticisms or attacks
whatever. The philosophy of that attitude has been pretty well set
forth I think by Emerson, though it has been so long since I have read
it that I do not now know in which of his essays or his poems or his
lectures he revealed it, though probably it would be found in all three
since, shrewd Yankee that he was, he cast every thought he had in three
forms. Had he lived in our day he might in addition have dramatized
each one of them. But from his advice never to apologize, one may
proceed to the virtue of never explaining. It saves an immense amount
of time and energy, for since a politician’s enemies are legion, and
are constantly increasing in number, and can attack him, as it were, in
relays, he must have enormous energy if he is to reply in detail to all
of them; he will find himself after a while more desperately involved
than was the man in Kipling’s story, who through the Indian Government
kept his enemy toiling night and day to answer foolish questions about
pigs, and, what was worse, explaining his previous answers.

Telling what one is going to do is equally as foolish as explaining
what one has done, or denying what one has not done, and so promises
could be dispensed with as easily as retorts and explanations. Long
catalogues of promised prodigies and miracles are of course absurd,
and the bawling and blowing politician (as Walt Whitman called him)
can make them as fluently in his evil cause as can the purest of the
reformers. I had been disgusted too often with such performances to
be able to enter into competition of that sort, and so let our little
platform speak for itself and did not even promise to be good. And the
people understood.

I have often heard men complain of the strain and fatigue of political
campaigning, and I sometimes think much of their distress arises from
the fact that they campaign in ways that are not necessary, if nothing
more derogatory is to be said of them. There is of course the fatigue
that comes of nervous strain and anxiety, and this is very great, but
the haggard visage and the husky voice are all unnecessary. It is no
wonder to be sure that some men break down in campaigns, since their
cause is so bad that anyone might well be expected to sicken in its
advocacy, and in furthering it it is perhaps inevitable that their
efforts partake in a measure of its corruption. There is no exercise
that is physically more beneficial than speaking, especially speaking
in the open air, provided one knows how to use his voice and does not
attempt to shout up the wind; and two or three speeches at noon, just
before luncheon and four or five more in the evening after dinner may
be recommended as an excellent course in physical culture, if when
one is done one’s speeches for the evening one will go home and, for
an hour, read, say “Huckleberry Finn” or “Tom Sawyer” before he goes
to bed. I can recommend these two great American novels with entire
confidence in their power to refresh, and in their deep and true and
delightful philosophy to correct aberrations in the point of view--of
one’s self, in the first place, and of some other things of much more
importance than one’s self. If the cause be one in which one believes
there is an incomparable exhilaration in it all. And it was with some
pride that I came through that first campaign without having lost
either my temper or my voice.

There must always remain the memory of those throngs in the meetings,
those workingmen who came pouring out of the shops and factories at
noon, glad as school boys to be released for a little while from
toil, laughing, whistling, engaging in rude pleasantries, jostling,
teasing and joking each other, and then, suddenly, pausing, gathering
about the motor car, drawing closer, pressing up to the foot-board,
and listening, with eager, intent faces, in which there was such
instant appreciation of a joke, a pleasantry, anything to make them
laugh, and yet somehow the adumbration of a yearning and a hope. Lyman
Wachenheimer--who as judge of the police court once had fined Jones
for contempt of court, but had come later to agree with him and now
was candidate for prosecuting attorney of the county--would stand up
in the car, lean over, and speak to them out of the splendid new faith
in democracy that had come to him, and the rest of us in our turn
would speak. We did not ask them to vote for us; our message was at
least higher than that old foolish and selfish appeal. First of all we
wished them to vote for themselves, we wished them to vote their own
convictions, and not merely to follow with the old partizan blindness
the boss or the employer or someone else who told them how to vote.
And all too soon for the orators warming to their work--they must
speak rapidly, they must speak simply and come to the point, for the
demands of the street meeting are obdurate and out under the open sky
there is short shrift for insincerity or any of the old pretense and
buncombe--the whistle blows, the men turn and scatter, the crowd melts
away, a few linger to the last minute to catch the last word, and then
they turn and run, and as they go they lift high the perpendicular
hand--Walt Whitman’s sign of democracy.... Do you know it? Sometimes
one of the section gang working on the railroad, pausing in his labor
while the Limited sweeps by, looks up and to the idle one on the rear
platform of the observation car, going for his long holiday, he waves
his hand in a gesture instinct with grace and the sincere greeting
of a fellow human being, and perhaps because--alas!--the moment of
their swift and instantly passing communication is isolated from all
the complexities of our civilized life, because it is to vanish too
soon for the differences men have made between themselves to assert
their distinction, there is that one instant of perfect understanding.
Sometimes a man in a boat sailing by will hail you with this gesture
from his passing craft; he is safe from long contact, he can run a
risk and for that little moment yield to the adventure of picking up
an acquaintance. Sometimes it is the engineer of a locomotive leaning
out of his cab window, giving you perhaps a droll wink, and there are
tramps who from a box car will exchange a friendly greeting. And I
shall never forget the little Irish sailor up on the boat deck with
whom I talked in the early darkness of an autumn evening in the middle
of the Atlantic, with the appalling loneliness of the sea as night came
down to meet it in mystery, and the smoke from the funnels trailed up
off to the southwest on a rising and sinister wind; he told me of his
mother and his uncle--“who makes his five guineas a week and doesn’t
know the taste of liquor”--and of his little ambitions, and so, after
a bit, of the mysteries of life, with a perfect _camaraderie_, as we
stood there leaning over the rail, and then, suddenly, when we parted,
invested himself with a wholly different manner, and touched his cap in
a little salute and left me to the inanities of the smoking-room.

It was something like that, those intimacies, vouchsafed for a moment
in our early meetings, whether those at noon or those at night, in the
suffocating little halls, or the cold tent, with the torches tossing
their flames in your eyes as you spoke, and it was even that way in
those curious meetings down in the darker quarter of the town, where
the waste of the city lifted up faces that were seared and scarred with
the appalling catastrophes of the soul that had somehow befallen them,
and there was unutterable longing there.

The one thing that marred these contacts was not only that one was
so powerless to help these men, but that one stood before them in an
attitude that somehow suggested to them, inevitably, from long habit
and the pretense of men who sought power for themselves, that one
needed only to be placed in a certain official relation to them, and
to be addressed by a certain title, to be able to help them. It was
enough to make one ashamed, almost enough to cause one to prefer that
they should vote for someone else, and relieve one from this dreadful
self-consciousness, this dreadful responsibility.

And these were the people! These were they who had been so long
proscribed and exploited; they had borne a few of the favored of the
fates on their backs, and yet, bewildered, they were somehow expectant
of that good to come to them which had been promised in the words
and phrases by which their very acquiescence and subjugation had so
mysteriously been wrought--“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Where? And for them, when? Not through the efforts of those who
employed cold phrases about “good” government, and “reform,” and
“business” administrations, and efficiency methods, and enforcement
of the laws, and law and order, and all that sort of thing, and class
consciousness, and economic, or any other interpretation of history,
or through initiatives, referendums and recalls. What good would any
of these cold and precise formulæ do them? Better perhaps the turkey
at Thanksgiving, and the goose at Christmas time which the old machine
councilman from the ward gave them; of course they themselves paid for
them, but they did not know it, and the councilman did not know it; he
had bestowed them with the voice of kindness, in the same hearty human
spirit in which he came to the wedding or the wake, or got the father
a job, or the oldest son a parole from the workhouse, and rendered a
thousand other little personal services. Perhaps Bath House John and
Hinky Dink were more nearly right after all than the cold and formal
and precise gentleman who denounced their records in the council. For
they were human, and the great problem is to make the government of a
city human.

There were many, of course, even in our own movement, who were not
concerned about that; I was strongly rebuked by one of them once in
that very first campaign for declaring that we were no better than
anyone else, and that all the “good” men of the world could not do the
people much good even if they were elected to the city government for
life. No, we may have efficient governments in our cities, and honest
governments, as we are beginning to have everywhere, and, happily,
are more and more to have, but the great emancipations will not come
through the formulæ of Independents, Socialists, or single-taxers,
nor through Law and Order Leagues, nor Civic Associations. Down
in their hearts these are not what the people want. What they want
is a life that is fuller, more beautiful, more splendid and, above
all, more human. And nobody can prepare it and hand it over to them.
They must get it themselves; it must come up through them and out of
them, through long and toilsome processes of development; for such is
democracy.

“That man’s program will take a thousand years!” Lincoln Steffens had
said in despair that day I introduced him to Jones. Yes--or a hundred
thousand. But there is no other way.




XXXV


The most efficient executive of which there is any record in history is
clearly that little centurion who could say: “For I also am a man set
under authority, having under me soldiers; and I say unto one, go, and
he goeth; and to another, come, and he cometh; and to my servant, do
this, and he doeth it.”

In my experience as an executive I learned that it was easy to say
“Go,” but that the fellows did not go promptly; I could say “Come,”
and he came--after a while, perhaps, when I had said “Come” again, and
that sometimes, having said “Do this,” I had to go myself and do it, or
leave it undone.

Executive ability is a mysterious quality inhering in personality, and
partaking of its mysteries.

I had gone into the mayor’s office feeling that I was about the most
ill-prepared man for such a job in the town. Naturally I had turned to
Tom Johnson, who had a tremendous reputation as an executive; even his
worst enemy, as the saying is, would not deny his wonderful executive
ability. I went to him in a sort of despair, and he laughed and leaned
over and whispered----

But perhaps after all I should not tell. It was spoken in confidence.
And it is ungenerous and unkind to destroy the cherished illusions of
the world, almost as unkind, I was about to say, as it is difficult,
since there is nothing the world so cherishes and hugs to its sad
old withered bosom as it does its illusions. It may be that they
are entirely necessary to it, it may be that it could not get along
without them. What would this nation have done, after all, if it had
not been for executive ability and the judicial temperament? The
judicial temperament consists, of course, in nothing more than the calm
assurance which enables one to put off till to-morrow problems that
should be decided to-day, for if allowed to go long enough problems
will solve themselves, just as letters unanswered long enough despatch
their own replies.

I had deduced that generalization for myself long ago, while waiting
for judges to hand down opinions, and then in decisions reading the
well-known formula: “The court does not find it necessary to pass on
this particular point at this time.” Why, I applied one time to the
Supreme Court, on a Wednesday morning, for a stay of execution on
behalf of a man who was to be burned alive in our electric chair on
the following Friday, and the judicial temperament who at that time
happened to be chief justice calmly said that the application would be
taken under advisement and a decision handed down in due course, which,
at the earliest, was the following Tuesday morning. But the governor
half an hour afterward said, “Oh, well, don’t worry; if the court
doesn’t act, I’ll reprieve him,” an example, perhaps, of what I had in
mind when I was writing those vague thoughts about making government
human. But executive ability! I had, and still have, great admiration
and reverence for that----

But Tom Johnson leaned over that afternoon, as we sat there in the
committee room of the House at Columbus, and laughed and whispered:

“It’s the simplest thing in the world; decide every question quickly
and be right half the time. And get somebody who can do the work.
That’s all there is to executive ability.”

I looked at him in amazement. He had grown quite serious.

“There’s another thing,” he added. “Don’t spend too much time in your
office. A quarter of an hour each day is generally too long, unless
there are a whole lot of letters. Of course,” he went on reflectively,
“you can get clerks who can sign your name better than you can.”




XXXVI


The first thing was to get men who could do the work, a difficulty
made greater because we have been accustomed to bestow public offices
as rewards for political service; the office is for the man, not the
man for the office. I had a friend, a young man, who had never been
in politics in his life, though he had been born and reared in Ohio.
He was of an old, wealthy and aristocratic family, a graduate of an
eastern university. His name was Franklin Macomber. I appointed him a
member of the Board of Public Safety--we still had the board plan of
government then--and the appointment to office of a young aristocrat
afforded the newspapers and cartoonists an opportunity for ridicule
which they did not overlook. But I knew the boy. I had seen him play
football, for one thing, and I knew how he managed his own business.
The vigor and the nerve he had displayed on the football field at once
showed in his duties, and the ability and devotion he displayed in his
own affairs he applied in the public service. The criticism to which
the administration was constantly subjected distressed him; he heard
so much of it at the fashionable club where he had his luncheons. One
afternoon he came into City Hall with an expression more somber than
usual, and as he sat down in my office he began:

“They are saying----”

“Who are saying?” I asked.

“The people,” he replied.

He had come, of course, from his luncheon at the club. His motor car
was at the door of the city hall, and I asked him to take me for a
drive, and I suggested certain parts of town through which, for a
change, we might go. We ignored the avenues and the boulevards, and for
two hours drove about through quiet streets far from the life of the
town as we knew it and as all men down in the business section knew
it--the old third ward, where the Poles lived, and around to the upper
end of the old seventh where the shops and factories were, and then on
over through the eighth and the ninth, and so up to the Hill, and after
we had passed by all those blocks and blocks of humble little homes,
cottages of one story, and all that, I asked him if he knew what the
folk who lived in them were saying about the administration.

“Why, no,” he answered. “I never talk with any of them.”

“Well,” I ventured to say, “they are the people, they who live in those
little houses with the low roofs. It is important to know how they
feel, too.”

I always felt that he had a new vision after that; he saw that if
government was to mean anything to these persons, it must be made
human, and the reforms in the police and fire departments he wrought
out in that spirit were such that when he died, in not quite four
years, when he was just turned thirty, the cartoonist had long since
ceased to caricature him as an idle fop, and the newspaper editorials
mourned him, in common with most of the community, as one of the best
public servants our city, or any city, ever had.




XXXVII


I went into the mayor’s office, as I said, all unprepared. My equipment
was what the observations of a political reporter, a young lawyer’s
participation in the politics of his state, and an intimacy with Golden
Rule Jones could make it. It was not much, though it was as much
perhaps as have most men who become municipal officials in our land,
where in all branches of the civil service, training and experience,
when they are considered at all, seem to be the last requisites. The
condition I suppose is implicit in democracy, which has the defects of
its own virtues, and founds its institutions in distrust. They order
these things better in Germany, by committing the administration of
municipal affairs to trained men as to a learned profession, though the
German cities have the disadvantage of having so reformed their civil
service that it is a monstrous bureaucracy. I had been chosen chiefly
because I had been the friend of my distinguished predecessor, and
for a long time I was so inveterately referred to as of that honored
relation, so invariably introduced as the successor of Golden Rule
Jones, that I was haunted by the disquieting dread that I was expected
to be, if not a replica of him, at least some sort of measurable
imitation of his manners and methods, the most impossible achievement
in the world, since his was a personality wholly original and unique.
And then besides, a man prefers to be himself. But of all those, and
they were many and respectable, who doubted my ability, there was none
whose distrust could exceed my own. I knew one thing, at any rate, and
that was, that I did not know.

Aside from my political principles, which I presume may as well be
called liberal, and certain theories which were called radical, though
even then I knew enough of human nature to know that they could not be
realized, especially in one small city in the American Middle West,
I had been able to make, or at least to recognize when others made
them, as Mr. Bryce and most of the students of municipal government in
America had done, two or three generalizations which, upon the whole,
after four terms in a mayor’s office testing them, I still believe
to be sound. The first was that, whatever the mere form of local
government, our cities were directly ruled by those small coteries we
had come to call political machines; the second, that these machines
ruled the cities for the benefit of public utility corporations; and
the third, that the legal power through which this was accomplished
was derived from legislatures controlled by the same persons in the
same interest. That is, the people had no voice in their own affairs;
representative government itself had disappeared. Therefore these
remedies seemed to be indicated, as the doctors say--non-partizan city
elections, municipal ownership, and home rule for cities. This was the
task, this was the program.

We had already defeated the machines; Jones had made that victory
possible by his great pioneer work in destroying the superstition of
party regularity. I say defeated the machines, when perhaps I should
say checked the machines, since the bosses remained and the partizans
who made them possible. And the public utilities were in private
hands, the street railway company still was there, desperate because
its franchises were about to expire, and its securities, through
the financiering too familiar to America in these latter days, six
times the amount of its actual investment. And down at Columbus, the
legislature still was sitting, controlled by rural members who knew
nothing of cities or of city life or city problems, farmers and country
lawyers and the politicians of small towns, who, in the historic
opposition of the ruralite to the urbanite, could not only favor their
party confreres and conspirators from the city--machine politicians
to whom they turned for advice--but gain a cheap _réclame_ at home
by opposing every measure designed to set the cities free. Thus the
bosses in both parties, the machine politicians, the corporations, and
their lawyers, promoters, lobbyists, kept editors, ward heelers, office
holders, spies, and parasites of every kind were lying in wait on
every hand. And besides, though inspired by other motives, the “good”
people were always insisting on the “moral” issue; urging us to turn
aside from our larger immediate purpose, and concentrate our official
attention on the “bad” people--and wreck our movement. Our immediate
purpose was to defeat the effort of the street railway company to
obtain a franchise, to prevent it from performing the miracle of
transmuting twenty-five millions in green paper into twenty-five
millions in gold, and thereby absorb the commercial values of half a
century. To do this it was necessary to win elections for years, and
to win elections, one must have votes, and “bad” people have votes,
equally with “good” people, and if one is to judge from the comment of
the “good” people on the election returns, the “bad” people in most
cities are in the majority. On that point, I believe, the reformers and
the politicians at least are agreed. More than this, we had to obtain
from reluctant legislatures the powers that would put the city at least
on equal terms with the corporations which had always proved so much
more potent than the city. Such was the struggle our movement faced,
such was the victory to be won before our city could be free from the
triumvirate that so long had exploited it, the political boss, the
franchise promoter, and the country politician. The Free City! That was
the noble dream.

Well might the wise and sophisticated laugh at their mayor and call him
dreamer! It was, and, alas, it is a dream. But youth is so sublimely
confident, and counts so little on opposition. Not the opposition of
those who array themselves against it--that was to be expected, of
course, that was part of the glorious conflict--but the opposition from
within the ranks, the opposition on the hither side of the barricade.
For youth thinks, sometimes, that even opponents may be won, if only
they can be brought to that vantage ground whence one inevitably
beholds the fair and radiant vision. It had not expected the falling
away of followers, of supporters, even of friends--the strangely
averted eye on the street, the suddenly abandoned weekly call, the
cessation of little notes of encouragement, the amazing revelations of
malignity and bitterness at election times, and the flood increasing in
volume at each succeeding election. One man, thought to be devoted to
a cause, fails in his desire to secure an office; another you refuse a
contract; he whom you neglected to favor in January punctually appears
in the opposition ranks in November, one by one they drop away, and
multiply into an army. Even in the official group in the City Hall and
in the council, there are jealousies, and childish spites, and pitiable
little ambitions and with them misunderstanding, gossip, slander,
anonymous attacks, lies, abuse, hatred, until youth makes the awful
discovery that there is, after all, in human nature, pure malice, and
youth must fight hard to retain its ideals, so continually are all the
old lovely illusions stripped away in this bewildering complication of
little tragedies and comedies we call life.

To be sure, youth might have known, having read the like in books from
infancy, and having made some reflections of its own on the irony of
things, and indulged from time to time in philosophizings. But that was
about the experience of others, from which none of us is wise enough
to learn. Most of us indeed are not wise enough to learn from our own.
It is all a part of life. What a thing human life is, to be sure, and
human nature! _Ay di mi!_ as Carlyle used to say. Patience, and shuffle
the cards!...

... I had no intention of recalling such things. Did not Jones say that
when the Golden Rule would not work, it was not the fault of the Rule,
but because one did not quite know how to work it? I have no intention
of setting down the failures or the little successes of four terms as
mayor. Nor shall I write a little history of those terms in office;
I could not, and it would not be worth while if I could. I shall not
attempt in these pages a treatise on municipal government, for if the
task were rightly executed, it would be a history of civilization.
Non-partizanship in municipal elections, municipal ownership, home
rule for cities,--who is interested in these? I have discussed them
in interviews--(“Is there to be a statement for us this morning, Mr.
Mayor?”)--and speeches numerous as autumn leaves, and like them, lost
now in the winds to which they were given.

After all, it is life in which we are all interested. And one sees a
deal of life in a mayor’s office, and in it one may learn to envisage
it as--just life. Then one can have a philosophy about it, though one
cannot discover a panacea, some sort of sociological patent medicine
to be administered to the community, like Socialism, or Prohibition,
or absolute law enforcement, or the commission form of government. One
indeed may open one’s eyes and look at one’s city and presently behold
its vast antitheses, its boulevards and marble palaces at one end, and
its slums, its tenements and tenderloins at the other. He may discern
there the operations of universal and inexorable laws, and realize the
tremendous conflict that everywhere and in all times goes on between
privilege and the people. Such a view may simplify life for him; it may
make easy the peroration to the campaign speech; it may provide a glib
and facile answer to any question. But he should have a care lest it
make him the slave of its own _clichés_, as Socialists for instance,
when they become purely scientific, explain every human impulse,
emotion and deed by simply repeating the formula “Economic determinism.”

But it will not do; it will not suffice. This view of life is simple
only because it is narrow and confined; in far perspectives there
appear curious and perplexing contradictions. And even then, the most
exhaustive analysis of life and of human society, however immense and
comprehensive, however logical and inevitable its generalizations, must
always fall short simply because no human mind and no assembly of human
minds can ever wholly envisage the vast and bewildering complexity
of human life. Each man views life from that angle where he happens
to have been placed by forces he cannot comprehend. All of which no
doubt is a mere repetition in feebler terms of what has heretofore
been spoken of the inherent vice of the sectarian mind. There are no
rigid distinctions of good and bad, of proletarians and capitalists, of
privileged and proscribed; there are just people, just folks, as Jones
said, with their human weaknesses, follies, and mistakes, their petty
ambitions, their miserable jealousies and envies, their triumphs, and
glories and boundless dreams, and all tending somewhither, they know
not where nor how, and all pretty much alike. And government, be its
form what it may, is but the reflection of all these qualities. The
city, said Coriolanus, is the people, and as Jones used to say, with
those strange embracing gestures, “I believe in _all_ the people.”




XXXVIII


However, all these confused elements make the task of a mayor
exceedingly difficult, especially in America where there are, not so
many kinds of people, but so many different standards and customs and
habits. When one gets down into humanity, one beholds not two classes,
separate and distinct as the sexes, but innumerable classes. In Toledo
something more than twenty languages and dialects are spoken every
day, and as the mayor is addressed the chorus becomes a very babel,
a confusion of tongues, all counseling him to his duty. The result
is apt to be perplexing at times. The rights of “business” in the
streets and to the public property, the proper bounds within which
strikers and strike breakers are to be confined, the limitations of the
activities of pickets, the hours in which it is proper to drink beer,
who in the community should gamble, whether Irishmen or Germans make
the better policemen; the exact proportion of public jobs which Poles
and Hungarians should hold; whether Socialists on their soap boxes are
obstructing traffic or merely exercising the constitutional right of
free speech, whether there are more Catholics than Protestants holding
office; whether the East Side is receiving its due consideration in
comparison with the West Side; whether boys have the right to play ball
in the streets, and lovers to spoon in parks, and whose conceptions of
morals is to prevail--these, like the sins of the Psalmist, are ever
before him.

And with it all there is a strange, inexplicable belief in the almost
supernatural power of a mayor. I have been waited on by committees--of
aged men--demanding that I stop at once those lovers who sought the
public park on moonlit nights in June, I have been roused from bed
at two o’clock in the morning, with a demand that a team of horses
in a barn four miles on the other side of town be fed; innumerable
ladies have appealed to me to compel their husbands to show them
more affectionate attention, others have asked me to prohibit their
neighbors from talking about them. One Jewish resident was so devout
that he emigrated to Jerusalem, and his family insisted that I recall
him; a Christian missionary asked me to detail policemen to assist
him in converting the Jews to his creed; and pathetic mothers were
ever imploring me to order the release of their sons and husbands from
prisons and penitentiaries, over which I had no possible jurisdiction.
I have recalled I know not how many times a remark Jones made one
evening after one of those weary days I afterward came to know so well;
“I could wash my hands every day in women’s tears.”

Of course, the main thing was not to wash one’s hands of them or their
difficulties. I remember one poor soul whose husband was in the
penitentiary. She came to me in a despair that was almost frantic, and
showed me a letter she had received from her husband. A new governor
had been elected in that state wherein he was imprisoned, and he urged
his wife, in the letter she gave me to read, to secure a pardon for him
before the new governor was inaugurated. “They say,” he wrote, “that
the new governor is a good church member, which is a bad sign for being
good to prisoners.”

Poor soul! It was impossible to explain to her that I was wholly
powerless. She stood and humbly shook her sorrowful head, and to each
new attempt at explanation she said:

“You are the father of all.”

It was a phrase which most of the women of the foreign born population
employed; they repeated it as though it were some charmed formula.
This exaggerated notion of the mayoral power was not confined to
those citizens of the foreign quarters; it was shared by many of the
native Americans, who held the mayor responsible for all the vices of
the community, and I was never more sharply criticized than when, in
refusing to sanction the enactment of a curfew ordinance, I tentatively
advanced the suggestion that, if it did not seem too outrageously
radical, the rearing and training of children was the duty, not so much
of the police as of parents, pastors and teachers.

It may have been because, in some way, it had got abroad that I was
a reformer myself. It was at a time when there was new and searching
inquiry, and a new sense of public decency, the result of a profound
impulse in the public consciousness, and I had been of those who in
my town had opposed the political machines. Constructive thinking and
constructive work being the hardest task in the world, one of which
our democracy in its present development is not yet fully capable, the
impulse spent itself largely in destructive work. That was natural;
it is a quality inherent in humanity. My friend Kermode F. Gill, the
artist-builder and contractor of Cleveland, once told me that while
it is difficult to get men to carry on any large construction, and
carry it on well, and necessary to set task masters over them to have
the work done at all, there is a wholly different spirit in evidence
when the work is one of demolition. If a great building is to be torn
down, the men need no task masters, no speeding up, they fly at it in a
perfect frenzy, with a veritable passion, and tear it down so swiftly
that the one difficulty is to get the salvage. And in the course of
building public works I have observed the same phenomenon. While the
forces are tearing down, while they are excavating, that black fringe
of spectators, the “crow line” the builders call it, is always there.
But when once the work is above ground, and construction begins, when
the structure lifts itself, when it aspires,--the crow line dissolves
and melts quite away. This, in a sense, is true of man in any of his
operations. When the great awakening came, after the first shock of
surprise, after the first resolve to do better, the public went at the
work of demolition, all about the arena the thumbs of the multitude
were turned down, and we witnessed the tragedy of men who but a short
while before had been praised and lauded for their possessions, and
used as models for little boys in Sunday-school, suddenly stripped of
all their coveted garments, and held up to the hatred and ridicule
of a world that can yet think of nothing better than the stocks, the
pillory, the jail, and the scaffold.

In Edinburgh I was shown a little church of which Sir Walter Scott was
once a vestryman, or deacon or elder or some such official, and in the
door still hung the irons in which offenders were fastened on Sunday
mornings so that the righteous, as they went to pray, might comfort
themselves with a consoling sense of their own goodness by spitting in
the face of the sinner. Many of our reforms are still carried on in
this spirit, and are no more sensible or productive of good.

The word “reformer,” like the word “politician” has degenerated,
and, in the mind of the common man, come to connote something very
disagreeable. In four terms as mayor I came to know both species
pretty well, and, in the later connotations of the term, I prefer the
politician. He, at least, is human. The reformers, as Emerson said,
affect one as the insane do; their motives may be pious, but their
methods are profane. They are a buzz in the ear.

I had read this in Emerson in my youth, when for a long time I had
a veritable passion for him, just as in a former stage, and another
mood, I had had a veritable passion for books about Napoleon, and, at
another, for the works of Carlyle, and the controversy excited by the
reckless Froude; but the truth--as it appears to me, or at any rate,
the part of a truth--was not borne in upon me until I came to know and
to regard, with dread, the possibility that I might be included in
their number, which I should not like, unless it were as a mere brother
in humanity, somewhat estranged in spirit though we should be.




XXXIX


The disadvantages of being classed as a reformer are not, I am sure,
sufficiently appreciated; if they were the peace of the world would
not be troubled as constantly as it is by those who would make mankind
over on a model of which they present themselves as the unattractive
example. One of those advantages is that each reformer thinks that all
the other reformers are in honor committed to his reform; he writes
them letters asking for expressions of sympathy and support, and,
generally, when he finds that each of the others has some darling
reform of his own which he is determined to try on an unwilling public,
he is at once denounced as a traitor to the whole scheme of reform
in the universe. Another disadvantage is that reformers never are
reëlected, and I might set forth others, were it my intention to embark
on that interesting subject.

I am moved to these observations, however, by the recollection of an
experience, exasperating at the time, though now of no moment, since
it has cured itself as will most exasperations if left long enough
to themselves. Its importance, if it have any importance at all, may
be ascribed to its effect of having saved me from any such fatal
classification, unless I were far enough away from home, where almost
anyone may be regarded as a reformer. To be sure, as I was just saying,
in the days immediately following my first election, I was regarded
by many of the sacred and illuminated host of reformers in the land
as one of them, since I was asked to join in all sorts of movements
for all sorts of prohibitions,--of the use of intoxicating liquors
and tobacco and cigarettes, and I know not what other vices abhorred
by those who are not addicted to them,--but it was my good luck, as
it seems now to have been, to be saved from that fate by as good and
faithful an enemy as ever helped a politician along. The Democrats had
been placed in power that year in Ohio, and with Tom Johnson, many of
us felt that it was an opportunity to secure certain changes in the
laws of Ohio relating to the government of cities, that is, we felt
it was time to secure our own reforms; everyone else, of course, felt
the same way about his reforms. We had organized late in the previous
year an association of the mayors of the cities in the state for the
purpose of making changes in the municipal code that would give the
cities a more mobile form of government and greater powers, in other
words, it was the first definite movement in favor of home rule for
cities, a liberation for which we struggled for almost a decade before
we achieved any measure of success. We had drafted a new municipal
code and had met at Columbus early in that January in which I took my
office, to put the finishing touches to our code before presenting it
to the legislature, and one morning I strolled into the hall of the
House of Representatives before the daily session had been convened.

There was in the House at that time a newly elected member whom Johnson
had supported for election and no sooner was he in his seat than he
opposed every measure Johnson espoused, and, under the warming applause
his disloyalty won from Johnson’s enemies, he became an opponent of
the mayor more vociferous than effective. He was exactly, I think, of
that type described by Emerson, who in the course of saying everything
worth saying, or that will be worth saying for the next two hundred
years, said: “Republics abound in young civilians who believe that
the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and
modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce,
education and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure,
though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get
sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish
legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that
the state must follow and not lead the character and progress of the
citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only
who build on Ideas build for eternity; and that the form of government
which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the
population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are
superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat; so much life as it has
in the character of living men is its force.”

I knew this young civilian then only as one of the Johnson group and
as that was sufficient introduction, in the _camaraderie_ that existed
between those of us who were devoted to the same cause, I stopped, at
his salutation, and chatted with him for a moment. He had asked my
opinion on a bill he had introduced, a measure to prohibit or regulate
public dances in cities, or some such thing, and when I failed to
evince the due degree of interest in the young man’s measure, he was at
once displeased and tried to heat me to the proper degree of warmth in
the holy cause of reform. He began, of course, by an indignant demand
to know if I was in favor of the evils that were connected with public
dances, and when I tried to show him that my inability to recognize his
measure as the only adequate method of dealing with those evils did
not necessarily indicate approval of them, he struck the prescribed
attitude, held up his right hand and said something in the melodramatic
style, about the oath of office I had taken not many days before. I saw
at once then that I was dealing with a member in high standing of the
order of the indurated sectarian mind, whose fanaticism makes them the
most impossible persons in the world, and having never been certain
which of the advice in the Proverbs should be accepted, I yielded to a
fatal habit of joking--the history of the Republic is strewn with the
wrecks of careers that were broken by a jest--and told him that I had
taken my oath of office before a notary public, and that perhaps it had
not been of full efficacy on that account.

And then I went away, and forgot the incident. It was revived in my
memory, however, and intensified in its interest for me the next
morning, when on getting back home, I saw in the newspapers a despatch
from Columbus, under the most ominous of black headlines, stating that
I had told the distinguished representative, on the very floor of the
House, under the aegis, one almost might say, of the state, that I had
no reverence for my oath of office, and did not intend to respect it.
Here was anarchy for you, indeed, from the old pupil of Altgeld!

It was, of course, useless to explain, since any statement I might make
would be but one more welcome knot to the tangle of misrepresentation
in which the unhappy incident was being so gladly snarled, and I tried
to forget it, though that was impossible, since it provided the text
for many a sanctimonious editorial in the land, in each one of which
some addition was made to the original report. Herbert Spencer says
somewhere that for every story told in the world there is some basis
of truth, and I suppose he is right, but I have always felt that he
did not, at least in my reading of him, sufficiently characterize
that worst vice of the human mind, intellectual dishonesty. Perhaps
if he had associated less with scientists and more with professional
reformers of the morals of other persons he would not have omitted this
curious specimen from his philosophic analysis, if he did omit it;
and if that experience of the young civilian at Columbus had not been
sufficient, I could have supplied him with another out of an episode in
which I had borne a part some years before, one which should have been
sufficient to warn me against the type for the rest of my life.

It concerns another young civilian, though this one was so old that
he should have known better, and relates to a time years before when
I happened to be running for the state senate. I say happened, for it
was precisely of that fortuitous nature, since I had not been concerned
in the circumstances which nominated me, so entirely negative in their
character that I might as well have been said not to be running at
all. I was a young lawyer, just beginning to practice, and in my wide
leisure was out of town that summer, economically spending a holiday at
my father’s house, and, since the Democrats had no hope in this world
of carrying the district, and could get no one who was on the ground to
defend himself to accept their nomination, they had nominated me. It
was an honor, perhaps, but so empty and futile that when I came home
again it seemed useless even to decline it, and best to forget it, and
so I tried to do that, and made no campaign at all. But one afternoon
I had a caller, a tall, dark visaged man, in black clerical garb, who
came softly into my office, carefully closed the door, and, fixing
his strange, intense eyes on me, said that he came to talk politics.
He represented a reform league and he came, he said, to discuss my
candidature for the state senate, and to offer me the support of his
organization. “Of course,” he went on to explain, “we should impose
certain conditions.” He fixed on me again and very intently, those
strange, fanatic eyes.

I knew very well what the conditions were; it was hardly necessary for
him to explain that I should be expected to sign a pledge to support
the bills proposed by his organization, some of which, no doubt, were
excellent measures.

I explained to him that I was under no illusions as to the campaign,
that there was no possible chance of my election that year, that if
there had been I never would have been nominated, and nothing short
of a miracle could elect me. “But,” I added, “even if that miracle
happens, though it will not, and I should be elected, I should go down
to Columbus and to the Senate able to say that I had made no promises
whatever.”

He looked at me a moment, with those strange, cold eyes peering
narrowly out of his somber visage, and as he gazed they seemed to
contract, and with the faint shadow of a smile that was wholly without
humor, he said:

“Well, you can say that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

The smile raised the man’s cheeks a little higher until they enclosed
the little eyes in minute wrinkles, and invested them with an
expression of the deepest cunning.

“Why, since you are opposed to signing our pledge, we will waive that
in your case, and you and I can have a little private understanding--no
one need ever know, and you can say----” he was gently tapping the ends
of his fingers together, and the last terms of his proposal seemed to
be absorbed by an expression of vulpine significance so eloquent and
plain in its meaning that mere words were superfluous.

I sat there and looked at him; I had known of him, he spoke nearly
every Sunday in some church, and took up collections for the reform to
which, quite sincerely, I believe, he was devoting his life. Then I
said:

“But that isn’t my idea even of politics, to say nothing of ethics.”

I believe now that he had no conception of the moral significance of
his suggestion that we have an implied understanding which I was to
be at liberty to deny if the exigencies of politics suggested it. He
was a reformer, belonging to the order of the indurated mind. He was
possessed by a theory, which held his mind in the relentless mould of
its absolutism, and there his mind had hardened, and, alas, his heart,
too, no doubt--so that its original impressions were all fixed and
immutable, and not subject to change; they could not be erased nor
could any new impressions be superimposed. He was convinced that his
particular theory was correct, and that if only it could be imposed on
mankind, the world would be infinitely better off; and that hence any
means, no matter what, were permissible in effecting this imposition,
because of the good that would follow. It is an old mental attitude in
this world, well treated of in books, and understood and recognized by
everyone except those who adopt it, and in its spirit every new reform
is promulgated by its avatar. But the reformer never thinks of himself
in any such light, of course, he does not understand it any more than
he understands mankind’s distrust of him. It is the instinctive fear of
the theorist that has been felt for every one of them from Robespierre,
the archtype, and impossibilist par excellence, down to the latest man
haranguing his little idle crowd on the street corner.




XL


These observations come with the recollection of those days of my first
term in the mayor’s office when I had so much to do with reformers
that I earnestly desired that no one would ever include me in their
category. They came to see me so often and in such numbers that my
whole view of life was quite in danger of distortion. It seemed that
half the populace had set forth in a rage to reform mankind, and their
first need was to get the mayor to use the police force to help them.
When they did not call at the office, they were writing letters. The
favorite day for these expressions of the reforming spirit was Monday.
I had been many months in the office however, before I was able to make
this generalization, though from the first I could observe that Monday
took on something of that dismal and somber tone which has given it
its name of blue Monday. In the early days of a simpler life in our
country, when the customs of the pioneer had not been superseded by the
complexities of modern existence, its color used to be ascribed to the
fact that it was wash day, and perhaps it has remained a sort of moral
wash day ever since. At any rate we soon discovered that everyone who
had a grievance or a complaint or a suggestion about his neighbor or
some larger scheme of reforming whole groups of the population was most
likely to be heavily charged with it on Monday, and since the almost
universal conception among us is that all reforms can be wrought by the
mayor, by the simple process of issuing an order to the police, these
complaints were of course lodged at the mayor’s office.

They were of a curious variety, expressing, I suppose, not only all
the moral yearnings of mankind, but all the meaner moods of human
nature, and each new Monday morning seemed to have in reserve, for a
nature that was trying to keep its faith in humanity, some fresh and
theretofore unimagined instance of the depths of little meannesses to
which human nature is capable of sinking. Many of them came in person
with their criticism, others sent anonymous letters. Then there were
those who came to repeat ugly things they had heard about me; “I
wouldn’t tell you this if I were not your friend. I think you ought
to know it.” Later in the afternoon the evenings’ newspapers, with
the criticisms marked, were laid on my desk. All this made Monday
the hardest day of the week, especially as the day closed with the
hebdominal session of the council, where one might find now and then
some pretty discouraging examples of human meanness. Tuesday was not
quite so bad, though it was trying; human nature seemed to run pretty
high, or pretty low, on that day, too. By Wednesday, the atmosphere
began to clear, and by Thursday and Friday, everyone seemed to be
attending to his own business and letting the faults of his neighbors
go unnoted or at least unreported, and Saturday was a day of such calm
that one’s whole faith in humanity was miraculously restored; if the
weather was fine one might almost discover human nature as to be good
as that nature which would reveal herself on the golf links.

As a result of it all we finally made the deduction--my secretary
Bernard Dailey, the stenographers in the office and the reporters who
formed so pleasant an element of the life there--that it was all due
to the effects of the Sunday that had intervened. In the first place,
people had leisure on that day and in that leisure they could whet up
their consciences and set them to the congenial task of dissecting the
characters of other people, or they could contemplate the evils in the
world and resolve highly to make the mayor do away with them, and then
after the custom of our land they could gorge on the huge Sunday noon
dinner of roast beef, and then lie about all afternoon like pythons in
a torpor which produced an indigestion so acute and lasting that for
three days it passed very well for pious fervor and zeal for reform.
Such at least was our theory, offered here solely in the scientific
spirit, and not by any means as final. It was acquiesced in by all of
us at the time, and has been supported by an unvarying series of data
on the Monday mornings since then.

We submitted it to Henry Frisch, the police sergeant who had been
detailed for duty in the mayor’s office for many years, a dear and
comfortable soul, who had served under several mayors, and had
developed a philosophy of life that was a very Nirvana of comfort
and repose. Long ago, so it seemed when he smiled indulgently on the
discomfiture of blue Monday, he had given up humanity as a bad job; to
him the race was utterly and irredeemably hopeless, and without the
need of saying a word he could shake his honest head at the suggestion
of a new reform with a motion that was eloquent of all negation. He was
very tolerant, however, and made no argument in rebuttal, he simply
refused to accept humanity on any general plane; regarding the race as
a biological species merely, he would confide to you that his years of
experience at that post and as a policeman who had paced his beat and
afterward commanded a sergeant’s squad, had convinced him that it was
altogether depraved, dishonest and disgusting, but with any individual
specimen of the species he was not that way at all. He was really
kindness itself. The next minute, with tears in his eyes, he would go
to any extremes to help some poor devil out of trouble. Unless it were
reformers; for these he had no use, he said, and if his advice had been
accepted he would have been permitted to expel them from the City Hall
by their own beloved weapons of violence and force of arms. On Sundays
he went fishing.

Perhaps at the time of which I am thinking, if not very specifically
writing, there was more of this Monday spirit of reform than is
usual. In the first place, much is expected of a new official and
because he does not promptly work those miracles which are confidently
expected whether he was foolish enough to promise them or not, he is
so generally complained of that it may be set down as an axiom of
practical politics that any elected official, in the executive branch
of the government, could be recalled at any time during the first year
of his incumbency of his office. Just then, too, there had been elected
to the governorship a gentleman who had been very deeply devoted to
the interests of the Methodist Church, the strongest denomination
numerically in Ohio--the first governor of Ohio, indeed, was a
Methodist preacher--and because of that fact and because of the use in
his inaugural message of the magic phrase “law and order,” it was at
once announced in the most sensational manner of the sensational press
that, unless all the sumptuary laws in Ohio were drastically enforced,
all the mayors of the cities would be removed. Governor Pattison had
been elected as a Democrat, and during his campaign Tom Johnson and
I had supported him, and it was while we were in Columbus at his
inauguration that this sensation was exploited in the newspapers. I
remember how Tom Johnson received it when one of his coterie brought
the extra editions into the hotel and pointed out to him the dreadful
predictions of the headlines; the white, aristocratic hand waved the
suggestion imperiously aside, and he said:

“Four days, and it’ll all be over. That’s the life of a newspaper
sensation.”

I believe that newspaper editors themselves place the limit of the
effectiveness of a sensation at about that time, though some of them
are so shrewd that they drop the sensation the day before the people
begin to lose interest in it, instead of waiting for the day on which
they actually tire of it. Which may be an explanation of the fact that
the beginnings of things are always treated so much more fully in the
press than their endings; one always reads of the opening of the trial,
and the awful charge, but is never told how it all came out in the end,
unless the end was catastrophic. The theory of the press is, I believe,
that good news is no news.

I do not know that poor Governor Pattison ever had any intention of
raising the issue of local self-government, and of raising it in such
a direct and positive way as by attempting to remove all the mayors
of Ohio towns and cities in which it could be shown that some little
enactment of the legislature had failed of absolute enforcement; I
suppose he had no such intention, since the law gave him no such power,
though that made no difference to the professional reverencers and
enforcers of law. The poor man never saw the governor’s office after
that night of his brilliant inauguration, when he stood, very dark and
weary, with features drawn, but resolutely smiling, at his levee in the
senate chamber, a tragic figure in a way, the first Democratic governor
in a long while, and the fates treating him with their customary irony
and indignity by setting their seal upon him in the very hour of his
triumph. He died in a few months, but there remained many of course who
could prophesy in his name and cast out devils with each extra edition
of the newspapers, and the discussion of law enforcement has gone on
pretty steadily from that time to this.




XLI


I suppose the discussion is one which must go on always in any land
where the people of our race and tradition dwell. A more objective,
natural and naïve people would not be so interested in sin, and
when the late Mayor Gaynor of New York spoke of the difficulty of
administering the affairs of a modern city according to “the standard
of exquisite morals” held aloft by some persons for others, he
designated in his clear and clever way a class of citizens familiar to
every mayor by the curiously doctrinaire order of indurated mind with
which they are endowed. They begin with the naïve assumption that their
standard is the one and only correct standard, and that since men have
repeatedly refused to adopt it on mere inspection they must be forced
to do so by the use of violence, a process which they call maintaining
“law and order.” They believe that any wrong, any abuse, may be stopped
instantly by the passage of a law, and if one venture to question the
efficacy of any plan they propose, he is said at once to be opposed to
morality and to religion, and is set down as a profane and sacrilegious
person.

It is, of course, inconvenient to argue with a person who has the
supreme refuge of the irrelevant conclusion; as inconvenient as it
would be were one to be offered carbolic acid as a toilet article,
and, upon refusal, be accused of not believing in cleanliness. This
order of mind imagines that every phase of human conduct can be ordered
and regulated by the enactment of statutes; that the industries,
occupations, clothing, amusements, appetites, passions, prejudices,
opinions, ambitions, aspirations and devotions of man can be changed,
moulded and regulated by city councils and state legislatures. Every
inconvenience, every difficulty, every disagreeable feature of modern
life, is to be done away by the passage of a law.

That our race is saturated with this curious and amazing superstition
of the power of written enactments is shown by the common terminology.
The mental reactions of a large portion of mankind against the
irritation of opposing opinion and conduct habitually express
themselves in the phrase, “There ought to be a law.” It is heard as
often every day as the stereotyped references to the weather. Not a
disagreeable incident in life is complained of without that expression;
no one has a pet aversion or a darling prejudice that he does not
cherish the desire of having a law passed to bring the rest of the
world around to his way of feeling. And when a trust is formed, or a
strike interrupts business, or the sheets on the hotel bed are too
short, or the hatpin of a woman in a crowded street car is too long,
or a new dance is introduced, or a boor preëmpts a seat in a train,
or a cat howls on the back-yard fence in the night time, or a waiter
is impertinent, or the cook leaves, the indignant citizen lifts his
eyes hopefully toward that annual calamity known as the session of the
state legislature, and repeats the formula: “There ought to be a law.”
And when the legislature assembles, a whole body of foolish bills is
introduced regulating everything in the earth, and some things that
are outside of the earth. If a deed is disapproved of by a group of
people, an agitation is begun to make it a criminal offense; by means
of pains and penalties the whole of life is to be regulated, and
government is to become a vast bureaucracy of policemen, catch-polls,
inspectors, beadles, censors, mentors, monitors and spies. As the
session draws toward its close, the haste to enact all these measures
becomes frantic. I shall never forget those scenes of riot, the howling
and drunkenness and confusion and worse I have witnessed in the
legislatures of Illinois and of Ohio the last night of the session.
And all this delirium goes on in every state of the Union, every
winter--and all these enactments must be revered. It is the phase of
the apotheosis of the policeman, who is to replace nurse and parent and
teacher and pastor, and, relieving all these of their responsibilities,
undertake to remould man into a being of absolute perfection, in whom
character may be dispensed with, since he is to dwell forever under
the crystal dome of a moral vacuum from which temptation has been
scientifically exhausted.

The reason is simple, and obvious; it inheres in the belief in the
absolute. Your true reformer is not only without humor, without pity,
without mercy, but he is without knowledge of life or of human nature,
and without very much of any sort of sweetness and light. The more
moral he is, the harder he is, and the more amazingly ready with cruel
judgments; and he seldom smiles except with the unction that comes
with the thought of his own moral superiority. He thinks there is an
absolute good and an absolute bad, and hence absolutely good people and
absolutely bad people.

The peculiar and distinguishing feature of his mind is that life is
presented to it in stark and rigid outline. He is blandly unconscious
of distinctions; he has no perception of proportions, no knowledge of
values, in a word, no sense of humor. His world is made up of wholly
unrelated antitheses. There are no shades or shadows, no gradations,
no delicate and subtle relativities. A thing is either black or white,
good or bad. A deed is either moral or immoral, a virtue or a crime.
It is all very simple. All acts of which he does not himself approve
are evil; all who do not think and act as he thinks and acts, are bad.
If you do not know when a deed, or an opinion is wrong, he will tell
you; and if you doubt him or differ with him, you are bad, and it is
time to call in the police. “Whenever the Commons has nothing else
to do,” said the wise old member of Parliament, “it can always make
a new crime.” Statutes are thus enacted, as the saying is, against
all evils, great and small, and the greater the evil, of course, the
greater the moral triumph expressed by the mere enactment. But because
of certain contrarieties in nature and a certain obstreperous quality
in human nature and a general complexity in life as a whole these legal
fulminations are frequently triumphs only in theory, and in practice
often intensify the very ills they seek to cure. As the witty Remy de
Gourmont says: _Quand la morale triomphe il se passes des choses très
vilaines._

The more intensively developed specimen of the type will not overtly
sin himself, but he loves to inspect those who do, and to peer at
them, and to wonder how they could ever have the courage to do it; he
likes to imagine their sensations, and to note each one of them as it
was developed in the interesting experience. And hence the psychic
lasciviousness of those who are constantly reporting plays and pictures
as fit for the censor they are always clamoring for. Sometimes they
go slumming as students of the evils of society. They are like pious
uncles who never swear themselves under any circumstances, but relate
stories of other men who do, recite their delightful experiences and
roll out the awful oaths with which the profane gave vent to their
feelings with a relish that is no doubt a relief to their own.

It is, I suppose, our inheritance from the Puritans, or the worst of
our inheritance from the Puritans, and it is possible that it is worth
while to have paid the penalty as a price for the best we derived from
them, since one has to take the bad with the good, though in those
days I often wished that the bequest had gone to some other of the
heirs. Perhaps in thus speaking of the good we had from them, I am
merely yielding to the fear of saying openly what I have often thought,
namely, that the good we had from the Puritans has been immensely
overestimated and exaggerated, and is not one whit better or greater
in quantity or influence than that we had from the Cavaliers, or for
that matter from the latest emigrant on Ellis Island. They themselves
appreciated their own goodness, and we have always taken their words
for granted. I have often thought that some day, when I had the elegant
leisure necessary to such a task, I should like to write “A History of
Puritanism,” or, since I should have to place the beginnings of the
monumental work in Rome as far back at least as the reign of the first
Emperor, perhaps I should be less ambitious and content myself with
writing “A History of Puritanism in the United States of America.” I
should have to begin the larger work at that interesting period of
the history of Rome when the weary Augustus was being elected and
reëlected president against his will and trying to gratify the spirit
of Puritanism that was even in such people as those Romans, by enacting
all sorts of sumptuary laws and foolish prohibitions, and trying out to
miserable failures every single one of the proposals that have since
that time been made over and over again in the hope of regenerating
mankind. The story of how the Emperor’s own daughter was almost the
first to disobey his regulations is dramatic enough to conclude rather
than to begin any history, and yet I could write it with much more
pity than I could the story of those Puritans who abounded in my own
locality in my own time. To write fairly and philosophically of them
I should have to wait not only for a leisure so large and so elegant
that I am certain never to have it, but I should have to cultivate a
philosophic calm which I own with shame is far from me when I think
of some of the things they, or some of them, did in their efforts to
force their theories on others. I should not recall such things now,
and if I were to put them in that monumental and scholarly work of
my imagination, it should be, of course, only in the cold scientific
spirit, and as specimens, say in nonpariel type, at the foot of the
page with the learned annotations.




XLII


Speaking of this passion for laws and regulations and how some of the
zealous would order even the most private and personal details of life
in these states, Mr. Havelock Ellis, in a brilliant chapter of his
work, “The Task of Social Hygiene,” takes occasion to observe that
“nowhere in the world is there so great an anxiety to place the moral
regulation of social affairs in the hands of police,” and that “nowhere
are the police more incapable of carrying out such regulation.” The
difficulty is due of course to the fact that the old medieval confusion
of crime and vice persists in a community where the Puritan tradition
still strongly survives. The incapability, as has been pointed out, is
not so much in the policemen as in that _bêtisse humaine_ which expects
such superhuman work of them.

This insistent confusion of vice with crime has not only had the effect
of fostering both, but is the cause of the corruption of the police.
Their proper function is to protect life and property and maintain the
public peace, and this the police of American cities perform as well
as policemen anywhere. But when, by a trick of the sectarian mind, the
term _crime_ is made to include all the follies and weaknesses and
vices of humanity, where there is added the duty of enforcing statutes
against a multitude of acts, some of which only Puritanical severity
classes as crimes, others of which are regarded by the human beings in
the community with indifference, tolerance or sympathy, while still
others are inherent in mysterious and imperative instincts which balk
all efforts at general control, the task becomes wholly impossible and
beyond human ability.

The police know it, and everybody knows it, and it is the hypocrisy of
society that corrupts them. The police know, intuitively, and without
any process of ratiocination, that people are human, and subject to
human frailties; they are pretty human themselves, and, in common
with most of the people in the community, see no great wrong in some
of the things that are done which the sumptuary laws condemn. Most
of them, for instance, drink a glass of beer now and then, or play a
game of cards, or go to a baseball game on Sunday. They are not apt
to be gentlemen of the most refined and exquisite tastes. And it is
difficult to induce men to take much interest in punishing acts their
own consciences do not condemn. This, with the situation at its best;
at its worst, knowing that, despite all the enactments of legislatures,
people will continue in their hardened ways, they are apt to abuse
their power. For they know, too, that the statutes prohibiting the
merely venial of those acts oftentimes run counter to the urban custom
and that the community regards it as of no great consequence if they
are not enforced. Thus a wide discretion is permitted the police by the
public conscience in the discharge of their duties, and this discretion
is one which quite humanly they proceed to abuse. If they choose, they
may enforce the sumptuary laws against certain persons or refrain
from doing so, and the opportunity for corruption is presented. The
opportunity widens, opens into a larger field, and not only does the
corruption spread, but it is not long before the police are employing
extra legal methods in other directions, and at last in many instances
establish an actual tyranny that would not be tolerated in a monarchy.
The result is that we read every day of arbitrary interferences by
policemen with most of the constitutional rights, such as free speech,
the right of assembly and petition, etc. They even set up a censorship
and condemn paintings, or prohibit the performance of plays, or assume
to banish women from the streets because they are dressed in a style
which the police do not consider _comme il faut_.

And while the corruption is deplored and everywhere causes indignation
and despair, this tyranny does not seem to excite resistance or even
remark; the press, the paladium of our liberties, does not often
protest against it, and few seem to have sufficient grasp of the
principle to care anything about it.

There is a story somewhere of a little girl, homeless, supperless,
shivering in rags in the cold rain of the streets of New York, and of a
passer-by observing in a kind of sardonic sympathy:

“And she is living under the protection of sixteen thousand laws!”

“Ah, yes,” said his friend, perhaps a professional reformer of third
persons, who naturally lacked a sense of humor; “but they were not
enforced!”

It is not altogether inconceivable that if all the laws had been
enforced the little girl’s condition would have been even worse than it
was, considering how haphazard had been the process of making all those
laws, and how, if set in motion, many of them would have clashed with
each other.

If they were effective, the whole of human kind would have been
translated, like Enoch, long ago. Of course, the assertion that they
had not been enforced was the obvious retort. And it was true, because
it is impossible to enforce all of them. And what is more no one
believes that all the laws should be enforced, all the time,--that is,
no one believes in absolute law enforcement, since no one believes that
the laws should be enforced against _him_. Everybody hates a policeman
just as everybody loves a fireman. And yet the fire department and the
police department are composed of the same kind of men, paid the same
salaries, and responsible to the same authorities. The duty of the
fireman is, of course, the simpler, because there is no disagreement
among men about the thing to be done. When a fire breaks out in the
city, the fire department is expected to rush to the spot, to pour
water on the fire, and to continue pouring water on the fire until it
ceases to burn. The reforming mind seems to think that the duty of the
policeman is of equal simplicity, and that when a wrong is done, the
sole duty of the police consists in rushing immediately to that spot,
seizing the wrongdoer, and, by confining him in a prison, thereby
eradicate his tendency to do wrong, and, by holding him up as an
example to others who are considering the commission of that wrong, to
deter them from it.

As far as crimes are concerned, the policemen, indeed, do fairly well.
Though that they succeed in any measure at all in discharging their
functions is a wonder when one considers the contumely and abuse that
are constantly heaped upon them in all our cities. The newspapers, when
there are no accounts of crime to print--and the assumption is that
crimes and casualties, if they are horrid enough, are the principal
events in the annals of mankind worth chronicling--can always print
suggestions of the crimes of the police. The reporter, a human being
himself, dissatisfied because the policemen cannot gratify his hunger
for sensation, is not to blame, perhaps; he views life from the
standpoint of his own necessities, and his conception of life is of a
series of exciting tragedies enacted with a view to making the first
edition interesting, so that the ears of the populace may be assaulted
in the gloom of each evening’s dusk by that hideous bellowing of the
news “boy,” whose heavy voice booms through the shade like some mighty
portent of disaster in the world.

This all sounds pretty hopeless, but if morals are to be wrought by
and through policemen, I am sure we shall have to pay higher salaries,
and procure men who are themselves so moral that their consciences are
troubled only by the sins of others; there is no other way. Unless,
of course, anything is left in these modern days of the theory of the
development of individual character. But that is the program of a
thousand years.

As for the future of municipal government in this land, I venture to
set down this prediction: That no appreciable advance will be made, no
appreciable advance can be made in any fundamental sense, so long as
the so-called moral issue is the pivot on which municipal elections
turn, or so long as it is allowed to remain to bedevil officials, to
monopolize their time and to exhaust their energies, so that they have
little of either left for their proper work of administration.

Either cities must have home rule, including the local police power,
with the right to regulate amusements and resorts and even vices
according to the will of the people in that city, whatever the rural
view may be, or some authority other than the mayor, and far wiser and
nobler than any mayor I ever knew or heard of, must be raised up by
the state in whom may be united the powers and functions of a beadle,
a censor, and a dictator. I have not the slightest idea where one so
wise and pure is to be found, but doubtless there are plenty who do, if
their modesty would permit them to speak.




XLIII


I used to recall, during the early and acute phase of this discussion,
an incident that occurred in the old Springfield days in Loami, down
in the Sangamon country. The little village in those days could boast
an institution unlike any, perhaps, in the land, unless it were to
be found in some small hamlet in the South. In the public square, on
a space worn smooth and hard as asphalt, a great circle was drawn,
and here, every day when the weather was fine, a company of old
men gathered and played marbles. What the game was I do not know;
some development of one of the boys’ games, no doubt, but with what
improvements and embellishments only the old men who understood and
played it could say. Its enthralled votaries played with large marbles,
which spun from their gnarled and horny knuckles all day long, with a
shifting crowd of onlookers gaping at their prowess. The players were
old and dignified, and took their sport seriously. There were to be
seen, about that big ring, sages who had sat on juries and been swayed
by the arguments of Lincoln; there were gray veterans who had gone with
Sherman to the sea and had been with Grant at Appomattox; and now, in
their declining years, they found pleasure and a mildly stimulating
excitement in this exercise. The skill they developed in the game is
said by those who have studied the subject on the ground to have been
considerable; some testify that these elders had raised their sport to
the point of scientific dignity, and that the ability they displayed
ranked them as the equals of golfers or of billiardists.

The exciting tournaments went on for years, the old gentlemen were
happy, the little village was peaceful and contented, when suddenly
the town was shocked by a new sensation. Loami elected a reform
administration. How it came about I do not know; some local muckraker
may have practiced his regenerating art, or perhaps some little rivulet
of the reform wave just then inundating the larger world outside
may have trickled down into Loami. What privilege in the town was
menaced I do not know; what portion of eminent respectability felt
its perquisites in danger I cannot say; but Privilege seems to have
done what it always does when pursued--namely, it began to cry for the
reformation of persons instead of conditions. The new reform mayor,
like many another mayor, was influenced; and, looking about for someone
to reform, his eye wandered out of the window of the town hall one May
morning and lighted on the grizzled marble-players, and he ordered the
constable into action.

Upon what legal grounds he based his edict I cannot say. It is not
vital for, as there were about sixteen thousand laws then running in
his jurisdiction, it would not have been difficult to justify his
action on legal grounds. It will be remembered that the old men were
playing in the public square; perhaps they played “for keeps,” and
it may have been that there were certain little understandings of a
speculative nature on the side. Above all, the old men were enjoying
themselves, and if this were not a sufficient offense what could be?
And if a constable’s highest duty were not to interfere with the
enjoyment of other folks what would become of the constitution and the
law?

At any rate the old men were forbidden to play, their game was rudely
interrupted, their ring obliterated, their marbles confiscated. There
was, of course, resistance; some skirmishing and scrimmaging; a heated,
acrimonious proceeding in the mayor’s court, and afterward hatred and
strife and bad feeling, the formation of factions, and other conditions
catalogued under law and order. But at length the space worn so smooth
under the trees near the bandstand was sodded, and the old fellows
might gather in silent contemplation of a new sign, “Keep off the
Grass,” and reflect upon this supreme vindication of authority.

But Loami is a democracy, or as much of a democracy as the state will
permit it to be, and when the next election rolled around the old men
were alert, and after an exciting contest they elected a mayor of their
own, a liberal. The reform mayor was relegated to the political limbo
of one-termers, the privileged few preserved their privileges, and
the old men, skinning the sod off that portion of the public square,
drew anew their huge bull-ring, resumed their game, and everybody was
happy and unreformed except, of course, the reformers; though perhaps
they were happy, too, in their restored misery of having something to
complain about and to wag their heads over.

In relating this veracious little tale of the lid of Loami, perhaps
I have not sufficiently revealed that attitude of moral sympathy
toward the good characters in the story which Tolstoy insists a writer
should always assume and maintain. But this has not been due to any
want of that sympathy. In the shadows of the scene the figure of the
mayor, for instance, has ever been present--the keenest sufferer, the
most unhappy man of them all. He was the one of all of them who was
burdened with official responsibility; the marble-playing faction was
happy in that it had no responsibility save of that light, artificial
sort imposed by the rules of its game; its conscience, indeed, was
untroubled. The other faction--the goo-goos, or whatever they were
called in Loami--felt responsible primarily for the short-comings of
others; their consciences were troubled only by the sins of other
people, the easiest and most comfortable, because it is the most
normal, position that the human conscience can assume. But the mayor
was held responsible for everything and everybody, and in seeking to
do his duty he found that difficulty which must everywhere increase
in a society and a civilization which, in casting off some of its old
moorings, recognizes less the responsibility of parent and teacher, not
to mention personal responsibility, and is more and more disposed to
look to the law and its administrators as the regulators and mentors of
conduct.




XLIV


It is an axiom of municipal politics that a reform administration,
or an administration elected as a protest against the evils of
machine government, boss rule, and the domination of public service
corporations, is immediately confronted by the demand of those who call
themselves the good people to enforce all the sumptuary laws and to
exterminate vice. That is, the privileged interests and their allies
and representatives seek to divert the attention of the administration
from themselves and their larger and more complex immoralities to the
small and uninfluential offenders, an old device, always, in the hope
of escape, inspired by privilege when pursued, just as friends of the
fox might turn aside the hounds by drawing the aniseed bag across the
trail. Many a progressive administration in this land has been led
into that _cul de sac_, and as Mr. Carl Hovey observed recently of the
neat saying to the effect that the way to get rid of a bad law is to
enforce it, the process usually proves to be merely the way to get rid
of a good administration. The effort had been made by the opponents
of Golden Rule Jones and it had failed. It had been attempted in the
case of Tom Johnson and it had failed, though curiously enough the
effort was never made in Toledo or in Cleveland or in Cincinnati,
or elsewhere for that matter, in the days of machine domination. The
Puritan never lets his religion interfere with business.

I used often to recall, in those days, a witty saying of Mr. William
Travers Jerome, when he was District Attorney in New York. He said he
often wished that there were two volumes of the Revised Statutes, one
to contain the laws enacted for human beings, and the other to embalm
the moral yearnings of rural communities.

It was disturbing and discouraging, of course, to feel that out there
in the community there was this shadowy mass of well intentioned
people, the most of whom no doubt, in common with all the rest of
us, did wish to see moral improvement, and yet so misconstrued and
misinterpreted our efforts. It was saddening, too, because in the
work we were trying to do we should have liked their sympathy, their
interest and their support. Because of their wider opportunity of
enlightenment much better and nobler things might have been demanded
of them, but as Johnson Thurston one night pointed out, they did not
show as much civic spirit, as much concern for the common weal as
those of smaller opportunities, those bad people as they called them
of whom much less would naturally have been expected. I made a rule,
as I have already said somewhere in these pages, not to talk back,
or to argue with them. They viewed life from the Puritan standpoint,
and I suppose that I viewed it from the pagan standpoint. The sins of
others and their mistakes and failures never did excite in me that
moral indignation which exists in the breasts of some; perhaps the old
distinction between bad people and good people had been blurred in my
consciousness. I could see that the bad people did many good things
in their lives, and that the good people thought many dark and evil
thoughts. I had seen indeed so much more kindness and consideration,
so much more pity and mercy shown by the bad that I felt strengthened
in my philosophy and in my belief that if their environment could be
improved, if they could have a better chance in life, they would be as
good as anybody. It seemed to me that most of the crime in the world
was the result of involuntary poverty, and the tremendous, perhaps
insuperable task, was to make involuntary poverty impossible. But in
the meantime there was other work to be done. Aside from the problem of
transportation which was but one phase of the great struggle between
privilege and the people, of plutocracy with democracy, there were
civic centers, city halls, markets, swimming pools, bridges to be
built, parks to be improved, boulevards and parkways to be laid out,
a filtration plant to be installed, improvements in all of the other
departments, a great mass of wonderful work for the promotion of the
public amenities, the public health, and the adornment of the city,
in a word, there was a city to be built, and strangely enough this
group of objectors of whom I have been speaking, were so intensely
preoccupied with moral considerations that they never had even the
slightest interest in these improvements. I think it is this spirit of
Puritanism that has made the cities of America so ugly, or permitted
them to be ugly; such conceptions as beauty and ugliness are perhaps
impossible to minds that know no distinction but good and bad, and for
this reason it has been difficult to make an æsthetic appeal with any
effectiveness.

During three of my four terms in that office the nasty quarrel about
morals raged. As I look back and think now with what virulence it did
rage, it appeals to me as a remarkable psychological phenomenon. Of
course it was bad for those who engaged in it, and bad for the town
as well, for such an exaggerated idea of conditions was given that
the police in neighboring cities, clever rogues that they were, could
always excuse and exculpate themselves for any of their delinquencies
by saying that the thieves that had come to town hailed from Toledo, or
that those they could not catch had gone and taken refuge there. But I
did not engage in the discussion nor permit the police officials to do
so. There was no time, since there was so much other work to do, and
we went on as well as we could with what Tom Johnson used to call the
policy of administrative repression, improving moral conditions with
such means as we had. We did succeed in eliminating the wine rooms,
in closing the saloons at midnight, and finally, after a tremendous
effort, in extirpating professional gambling. It was of no consequence
that it did not have any effect upon criticism, for we did not do it
to stop criticism, and the discussion went on until I had been elected
for the third time, and immediately after that election when a large
majority of the people had again spoken their minds on the subject, it
was considered the proper time to reopen the discussion and to hold a
so-called civic revival. The young, uncultured man they brought to town
to conduct that revival, could have known nothing whatever of life, and
was wholly unconscious of the great economic forces which, with so much
complexity and friction, were building the modern city. He came to call
on me before he opened his revival that he might have, as he said, a
personal, private and confidential talk. When I asked him how the city
could be regenerated, he said he did not know, but this fact did not
prevent him from telling the audiences he addressed that week just what
should be done, and that he, for instance, could nobly do it, and in
the end they sent a committee to me to tell me what to do, if not how
to do it. I asked the committee to reduce their complaints to writing,
to point out those evils which they considered most objectionable,
and to propose means of combating them. The committee went away and
I confess I did not expect to see them again because I had no notion
that they could ever agree as to the particular evils, but after some
weeks they had come to terms on a few heads, and filed their complaint
pointing out several specific vices in town, and as a remedy proposed
that they be “prevented.” I replied to them in a letter in which I
said all I could think of at that time or all I could think of now on
this whole vexed problem. It was printed in pamphlet form and rather
widely circulated, and finally published as a little book.[B] I do not
know that it convinced anybody who was not convinced already. I think
we got along a little better afterward than we had before, and by the
time my fourth term was done the phenomenon of the discussion, if not
the vice, had disappeared. After my letter was sent to the committee,
it was said that they would reply to it, but they never did, and
instead invited the Reverend William A. Sunday to come to the city to
conduct a revival. It was announced by some that he came to assault our
position, but when he arrived Captain Anson, the old Chicago baseball
player, under whom Mr. Sunday had played baseball in his younger days,
happened to be giving his monologue at a variety theater that week,
and he and Mr. Sunday together called on me. I do not know when I have
had a pleasanter hour than that we spent talking about the old days in
Chicago when Anson had been playing first base and I had been reporting
the baseball games for the old _Herald_. That, to be sure, was after
the days of Billy Sunday’s services in right field, but it was not too
late for me to have known and celebrated the prowess of that famous
infield, Anson, Pfeffer, Williamson and Burns, and we could celebrate
them again and speculate as to whether there were really giants in
those days whose like was known on earth no more.

Mr. Sunday conducted his revival with the success that usually attends
his efforts in that direction, but he did not mention me or the
administration until the very close of his visit, when he said that
we were doing as well as anybody could be expected to do under all the
circumstances.




XLV


When I referred to the general rule that policemen are disliked and
condemned I should have noticed certain exceptions. The traffic squad
for instance is generally held in a respect and affection that is part
of the civic pride of the community. Those fine big fellows on the
corner, waving this way or that with a gesture the flowing traffic
of the street, are greeted with smiles, and, as they assist in the
perilous passage of the thoroughfares, sometimes with thanks and
benedictions. The reason, of course, is simple; they are not engaged
in hurting people, but in helping people, and so by the operation of
the immutable law, they attract to themselves the best feelings of the
people.

And this is what we tried from the first to have all our policemen
do, to help people and not to hurt them. It was what Jones had tried
to do, and he had begun with one of the most interesting experiments
in policing a city that has been made in our country. He took away
the clubs from the policemen. He could have made at first no greater
sensation if he had taken away the police altogether, the protest was
so loud, so indignant, above all so righteous. What sense of security
could a community feel if the policemen were to have no clubs, how
would the unruly and the lawless be kept in check when they no longer
beheld this insignia of authority in the hands of the guardians of the
peace? And perhaps to reassure the righteous and truly good Jones gave
the policemen canes and ran the great risk of making them ridiculous.

I am not sure that he would have cared much if he had, since he had
so little respect for the police idea, and of course he had as little
regard for organization. I remember once that at a session of the
old police board he opposed the creation of new sergeants; he said a
sergeant always seemed as superfluous to him as a presiding elder in
the Methodist Church. With an elected board of police commissioners
over it the police force was pretty certain to be demoralized, of
course, as is any executive department of government which is directed
by a board, for with a board, unless all the members save one are
either dead or incapacitated, discipline and efficiency are impossible.
We got rid of the board system in Ohio after two or three sessions of
the legislature had been wrestled with, and though the “mayor’s code”
was never enacted, many of its ideas were adopted in amendments to the
municipal code, so that we approached the most efficient form of city
government yet devised in our rather close resemblance to the federal
plan.

The time came, however, when the old elected board of public service
was succeeded by a director of public service appointed by the mayor,
and the old board of public safety by a director of public safety
appointed by the same authority, though that was not until I had
entered on my third term in the mayor’s office. When that time came
I appointed as Director of Public Service Mr. John Robert Cowell, a
Manxman who managed the department of public works admirably, and to
the post of Director of Public Safety Mr. John Joseph Mooney, whose
services and assistance I had already had on the board of public safety
when that was appointed by the mayor. And Mr. Mooney was able to work
out many of the improvements we hoped to make in the police department.

And as Jones had taken the clubs away from the policemen and given
them canes, we took away the canes and sent them forth with empty
hands. Jones had the idea of doing away with clubs from London where
he observed the bobbies who control the mighty traffic in the streets
of London. We were therefore able to realize the whole of his ideal in
that respect, and our city, I think alone of all American cities, could
not merit the reproach that a Liverpool man once made to me when we
were discussing superficial appearances in the two nations. “The most
offensive thing in America to me,” he said, “is the way in which the
policemen parade their truncheons.” The public made no complaint at
the disappearance of the canes, but the policemen did; they felt lost,
they reported, without something to twirl in their hands. We thought of
letting them have swagger sticks, but finally decided that they should
be induced to bear themselves gracefully with their white gloved hands
unoccupied. The white gloves were the subject of amusement to the boors
in town, who could always be amused at any effort at improvement, but
with them on, and the new uniforms we had patterned after the uniform
worn by the New York policemen, the members of the department soon
began to have a pride in themselves.

And that was exactly what we were trying to inculcate, though it was
difficult to do, and almost impossible, one might think, since for
generations policemen have been the target for the sarcasms and abuse
of every voice of the community. The wonder is, with such an universal
conspiracy as exists in America to give policemen a bad name, that they
have any character left at all. Surely each community in various ways
has done everything it could to strip its policemen of every shred of
reputation and self respect and with these gone, character might be
expected shortly to follow. Of course the new uniforms were ridiculed
too, but we did not let that discourage us.

There was the civil-service law to help, and we were of old devoted
to the spirit and even to the letter of that, though once the letter
of that law compelled us to an injustice, as the letter of any law
must do now and then. We had reorganized the police department on a
metropolitan basis, and had done the same with the fire department, and
in this department there were accordingly created three new positions
of battalion chiefs, for which captains were eligible. The oldest
ranking captain in the department was Dick Lawler, by everyone in the
department from the chief down conceded to be the best fireman in the
department, with a long and untarnished record of devoted duty and
quiet, unassuming bravery. And it was his natural ambition to round out
that career as one of the chiefs. The examining board held a written
test, and as Lawler was more accomplished in extinguishing, or, as his
comrades expressed it, in fighting fire, and much more comfortable and
at home on the roof of a burning building than he was at a desk with a
pen in his hand, he did not do very well. When, for instance, he read a
long hypothetical question, setting forth certain conditions at a fire
and asking the applicant where, under such circumstances, he would lay
the hose, Lawler wrote down as his answer, “Where it would do the most
good,” and on that answer the board marked him zero. The board marked
him zero on so many answers indeed that the net result was almost zero,
and he failed.

It was a kind of tragedy, in its little way, as he stood in my office
that morning on which he came to appeal from the board, with tears in
his eyes. But the law was obdurate and I was helpless. But I did point
out to the examining board the absurdity of such methods of testing a
man’s ability, and after that they allowed a man’s record to count for
fifty per cent. And it was not long until a vacancy occurred among the
chiefs--and Lawler was appointed.




XLVI


The questions put to Lawler were perhaps no more absurd than many
a one framed by civil-service examiners. In any event the written
examination is apt to do as much harm as good, and for policemen and
firemen we came to the conclusion that it was almost wholly worthless,
once it had been determined that an applicant could write well enough
to turn in an intelligible report. The initial qualification on which
we came to rely and to regard as most important was the physical
qualification. There is no way to tell by asking a man questions
whether he will be a good policeman or not; the only way to find
that out is to try him for a year. But his physical condition can be
determined, and on this basis we began to build the police force, under
the direction of Dr. Peter Donnelly, one of the ablest surgeons in the
country, whose tragic early death was seemingly but a part of that
fate which took from us in a few short years so many of the best and
brightest of the young men in our movement. The death of Peter Donnelly
left us desolate because he had a genius for friendship equal to that
genius as a surgeon which enabled him to render a great social service.

He was perfectly rigid in the examinations to which he subjected
applicants for positions in the department, and wholly inaccessible to
any sort of influence in favor of the unfit. In the old days, which
by many were regretted as the good old days, the only qualification
an applicant needed was a friend on the police board, and as a result
the force was encumbered with the lame, the halt, and the blind; there
were drinkers if not drunkards among them, and the paunches which some
bore before them were so great that when they took their belts off
and hung them up in those resorts where they accepted the hospitality
of a midnight meal, the belts seemed to be as large as the hoops of
the Heidelberg tun. We rid the force of these as quickly as it could
be done, and the recruits who replaced them were, because of Dr.
Donnelly’s care and service, superb young fellows, lithe and clean, who
bore themselves with self respect and an ardent pride in that _esprit
de corps_ we were enabled to develop.

But before that spirit could exist there were defects other than
physical that must be removed; there were old jealousies and
animosities, some of a religious, or rather a theological nature--relic
of an old warfare between the sects that once devastated the town with
its unreasoning and remorseless and ignorant hatred; a St. Patrick’s
day had once been celebrated by dismissing a score or more of Irishmen
from the police department. There were other differences of race
origin, and in doing away with all these, so far as it could be done,
Mr. Mooney, the Director of Public Safety, had to his assistance the
ability and the tact of two crusted old characters on the force, one
of them the Chief of Police, Perry D. Knapp, and the other Inspector
John Carew, whose hair had so whitened in the days he served the city
as a detective that he was called Silver Jack. He was one of the ablest
detectives anywhere, though prejudice and jealousy had kept him down
for a long time. I had known him in my youth, and later in the courts,
and now that I had the chance I put him at the head of the detective
department, and when I was tired of the troubles which harassed him
and me during the day, I tried sometimes to forget them at night by
writing stories in which he figured as the clever detective he was.

And as for Perry Knapp, I suppose there was not another chief of
police like him anywhere. Over his desk was a picture of Walt Whitman,
and in his heart was the love for humanity that Whitman had, and in
his library were well read copies of Emerson and a collection of
Lincolniana I have often envied him. He had served in close association
with Jones, who had made his position difficult by promoting him over
the heads of others in the department who ranked him, and he was
the heir of all the old distrust of Jones’s attitude toward life.
Nevertheless, he found a way to apply Jones’s theories to the policing
of a city without any of that ostentation which in some cases has
brought such methods into disfavor. I cannot, of course, describe his
whole method, but he was always trying to help people and not to hurt
them. He established a system by which drunken men were no longer
arrested, but, when they could not be taken home as were those club
members with whom he tried in that respect at least to put them on a
parity, they were cared for at police headquarters until morning, and
then with a bath and a breakfast, allowed to go without leaving behind
to dog their footsteps that most dreadful of all fates, a “police
record.” No one will ever know how many poor girls picked up in police
raids he saved from the life to which they had been tempted or driven,
by sending them back to their homes when they had homes, or in some
manner finding for them a way out of their troubles. And I shall always
remember with a pleasure that there is such good in humanity after all,
when I recall that boy in the workhouse whom a father in a far-off
city was seeking. The boy was working with other prisoners on a bit
of public work in one of the parks that winter morning, and after he
had secured a parole, the Chief drove out to the park, and got the
boy, clothed him with garments he had bought himself, bought a railway
ticket and sent the boy away to Chicago and his home. If he had waited
until the lad was brought in at night, he explained, the old man would
have lost a whole day of his son’s companionship!

That is what I mean when I say that a government should be made human,
or part of what I mean; such incidents are specifically noticeable
because they stand out in such contrast against the hard surface of
that inhuman institutionalism the reformers with their everlasting
repressions and denials and negatives are trying to make so much
harder. Charley Stevens, the old circus man whom I appointed as
Superintendent of the Workhouse, very successfully applied the some
principle to the management of that institution, which he conducted
with his humor and quaint philosophy more than by any code of rules.
He usually referred to his prison as the Temple of Thought, and he
abolished from it all the marks of a prison, such as stripes and
close cropped polls, and all that sort of thing. He was criticized,
of course, since the conventional notion is that prisoners should be
made to appear as hideous as possible; I am pretty sure that reformer
disapproved who one Sunday afternoon went down there and asked the
superintendent if he would permit him to preach to the inmates and was
told by Stevens that he would like to accommodate him, but that he
could not just then break up the pedro game. There were those who said
that he was making it too easy for the prisoners, and yet every now
and then some of them would escape, and when they were brought back,
as they usually were, they were met only with reproaches and asked why
they could not leave their addresses when they went away so that their
mail could be forwarded. There were, however, two escaping prisoners
who never were returned. They got away just in time to make a sensation
for the noon editions of the newspapers, and as I was on my way to
luncheon I met Stevens, standing on the street corner, very calmly,
while the newsboys were crying in our ears the awful calamity that had
befallen society. When I asked what he was doing, he said that he was
hunting the escaped prisoners. “I’ve been to the Secor and the Boody
House,” he said, naming two leading hotels, “and they’re not there. I’m
going over to the Toledo Club now, and if they’re not there, I don’t
know where to look for them.”

It may be that in these little incidents I give the impression that he
was a trifler, but that is not the case. He knew, of course, that so
far as doing any good whatever in the world is concerned, our whole
penal system is a farce at which one might laugh if it did not cause
so many tears to be shed in the world. But he did try to be kind to
the inmates, and by the operation of the parole system succeeded to
an extent commensurate with that attained by Dr. Cooley of Cleveland.
Of course it was all done under the supervision of Mr. Mooney, the
Director of Public Safety, who rightly characterized our whole penal
system when he said:

“Whenever you send one to prison you send four or five; you send a
man’s wife and his mother, and his sister and his children, who are all
innocent, and you never do him any good.”

But the workhouse, though under Mr. Mooney’s direction, was not
connected with the police department, except in the archaic minds of
those who thought if we were only harsh and hard enough in our use of
both, we could drive evil, or at least the appearance of evil, out
of the city, and leave it, standing like a rock of morality, in the
weltering waste of immorality all about us.




XLVII


In no respect has the utter impotence of medieval machinery in
suppressing vice been more definitely proved than in the great failure
of society in dealing with what is called the social evil. Whenever
my mind runs on this subject, as anyone’s mind must in the present
recrudescence of that Puritanism which never had its mind on anything
else, I invariably think of Golden Rule Jones and the incidents in
that impossible warfare which worried him into a premature grave. He
was an odd man, born so far out of his time that the sins of others
never troubled his conscience. He was so great, and knew so much of
life, more perhaps than he did of history, on every page of which he
would have found the confirmations of the opinions life had taught him,
that he divined all lewdness, all obscenity to be subjective and not
objective, so that he found less to abhor in the sins of the vicious
than in the state of mind of their indefatigable accusers and pursuers.
And he had his own way of meeting their complaints. Once a committee of
ladies and gentlemen called upon him with the demand that he obliterate
the social evil, off-hand and instantly. They were simple, brief and to
the point. They informed him that the laws providing for chastity were
being broken, that there were prostitutes in the city, and in short,
urged him to put a stop to it.

“But what am I to do?” he inquired. “These women are here.”

“Have the police,” they said, a new, simple and happy device suddenly
occurring to them, “drive them out of town and close up their houses!”
They sat and looked at him, triumphantly.

“But where shall I have the police drive them? Over to Detroit or to
Cleveland, or merely out into the country? They have to go somewhere,
you know.”

It was a detail that had escaped them, and presently, with his great
patience, and his great sincerity, he said to them:

“I’ll make you a proposition. You go and select two of the worst of
these women you can find, and I’ll agree to take them into my home and
provide for them until they can find some other home and some other way
of making a living. And then you, each one of you, take one girl into
your home, under the same conditions, and together we’ll try to find
homes for the rest.”

They looked at him, then looked at each other, and seeing how utterly
hopeless this strange man was, they went away.




XLVIII


To be sure, that was in another day. Prostitution had not become a
subject for polite conversation at the dinner table; pornographic vice
commissions had not been organized and provided with appropriations so
that their hearings might be stenographically reported and published
along with the filthy details gathered in the stews and slums of
cities by trained smut hunters; it had not yet been discovered that
the marriage ceremony required a new introduction, based upon the
scientific investigations of the clinical laboratory, and on the same
brilliant thought that centuries ago struck the wise men of Bohemia,
who, when the population increased too rapidly, prohibited marriages
for a number of years that proved, of course, to be the most prolific
the land had ever known.

The new conception was created in a moment, in the twinkling of an
eye, by the necromancy of a striking phrase. I do not know who it is
that had the felicity to employ it first in its present relation. I
remember that long years ago, when as a boy I used to frequent the
gallery of the theater, I sat rapt afar in the mystery and romance
of life on the Mississippi while gazing on the scenes of Bartley
Campbell’s melodrama “The White Slave.” I can call back now, with
only a little effort of the imagination and the will, that wonderful
pageant--the _Natchez_, the _Robert E. Lee_, the great steamboats I
knew so well from Mark Twain’s book, the plantation hands, the darkies
singing on the levee, the moonlight and the jasmine flower--and there
was no David Belasco in those days to set the scene either, nor, for
the imagination of youth, any need of one! And then the beautiful
octoroon, so lily white and fragile that it should have been patent to
all, save perhaps an immoral slave-holder, from the very first scene,
that she had no drop of negro blood! And the handsome and cruel owner
and master, with his slouch hat and top boots, and fierce mustache and
imperial, taking her to her awful fate down the river! It was an old
story Bartley Campbell used for his plot, a story which had for me an
added interest, because my grandfather had told it to me out of his
own southern experiences, in those far-off days when he had business
that took him down the river to New Orleans. And it was a story which,
for a while, in many variants of its original form, was told all over
the land to illustrate the immorality of slavery. I suspect that it
was not altogether true in its dramatic details; surely no such number
of lovely and innocent creatures were permitted to fling themselves
into the Mississippi from the hurricane decks of steamboats as the
repetitions and variations of that tale would indicate; it would have
been altogether too harrowing to the voyagers, some few of whom at
least must have been virtuous, and journeyed up and down on peaceful
moral missions of one sort and another. No doubt it was symbolic of
a very wrong condition, and I suppose that is what justified it in
the minds of those who told it over and over without the trouble of
verifying its essential details. It was a good story, and in the
hands of Mr. Howells it made a good poem, and it made surely a pretty
good play, which, could it enthrall me now as once it did by its
enchantments, I should like to see again to-night!

But I doubt if I could sit through any one of the plays that have
been written or assuredly are to be written about the white slaves of
to-day. The plot has been right at hand in the tale that has gone the
rounds of two continents, and resembles that elder story so closely in
its incidents of abduction that I presume the adapter of its striking
title to the exigencies of current reform must have been old enough to
recognize its essential similarity to the parent tradition. It was told
in books, it served to ornament sermons and addresses on sociological
subjects, and it has, I believe, already been done in novels that are
among the best sellers. The newspapers printed it with all its horrific
details; it was so precisely the sort of pornography to satisfy the
American sense of news--a tale of salacity for the prurient, palliated
and rendered aseptic by efforts of officials, heated to the due
degree of moral indignation, to bring the concupiscent to justice.
I had been in England, too, when the subject was under discussion
there, and this same story was told to such effect that Parliament,
as hysterical as one of our own state legislatures, had been led to
restore the brutality of flogging. It was always the same: some poor
girl had been abducted, borne off to a brothel, ruined by men employed
for that purpose, turned over to aged satyrs, and never heard of more.
Of course there were variations; sometimes the girl was lured away
in a motor car, sometimes by a request for assistance to some lady
who had fainted, sometimes by other ruses. The story was always told
vehemently, but on the authority of some inaccessible third person,
to doubt or question whom was to be suspected of sympathy with the
outrage. But however high the station, or unimpeachable the character
of the informants, anyone who had the slightest knowledge of the rules
of evidence, unless he were especially credulous, would have reason
to doubt the tales. In Toledo it had its vogue. It went the rounds of
gentlemen’s clubs and the tea tables of the town, and in the curious
way stories have, it went on and on with new embellishments at each
repetition. I had a curiosity about it, not because I cared for the
realistic details that might as Pooh Bah used to say, “lend an air
of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing
narrative,” but because here was a chance to test it at first hand,
and so I asked the person most heroically concerned to come and tell
me of an experience that had earned for him the plaudits of many of
his fellow citizens and citizenesses. And so he came. He was a social
worker, as they are called, and had had the training in settlement work
which is said to qualify young persons to deal professionally with the
poor and wicked. He was a rather good looking young chap, with a smile
about his full red lips, who lifted his mild eyes to yours with perhaps
an effort at frankness too pronounced. He spoke well and fluently.

One night (he said) at the close of a hard day’s work in his mission,
a man came to him in evident distress. The man was a business man, in
comfortable though modest circumstances, with a family of which perhaps
the most interesting member was a beautiful girl of seventeen. The
girl was attending a high school, where she was in one of the advanced
classes, and the evening before had gone from school to spend the night
at the home of a friend, a girl of her own age. The next evening, on
her failure to return home, the parents became alarmed, and after
unavailing inquiry at her schoolmate’s house, and in other quarters,
the distraught father had appealed to the social worker. The social
worker at once caused an investigation to be made, and by a process
of elimination (as he said, though unlike Sherlock Holmes, he did not
detail the successive steps of his logic), he concluded that the girl
was in a certain quarter of the city, in fact in a certain street. He
then sent for the father, told him to supply himself with sufficient
money, instructed him in the part he was to play, and was careful to
stipulate that if he, the social worker, were to feign drunkenness or
to indulge in conduct out of keeping with his character, the father was
patiently and trustingly to await results. Thereupon they set forth,
and before midnight visited some thirty houses of ill fame. In the
thirty-first house the suspicions of the social worker were confirmed,
and, pretending to be intoxicated, he invited an inmate to accompany
him, and ascended to the upper floor. He tried the doors along the
hall, and finding them all open but one, and that locked, he lurched
against it, broke it open, and on entering the room surprised a young
woman, entirely nude, who screamed--until he muttered some word of
understanding and encouragement. Meanwhile the inmate had summoned
madame the proprietress, who flew up the stairs, burst into the room
and emptied her revolver at the social worker.

The social worker, at this supreme moment in his recital, paused, and
with a weary but reassuring smile, as who should say such adventures
were diurnal monotonies in his life, remarked: “with no damage,
however, to anything but the furniture and the woodwork.”

But he had the girl in his arms, and, thrusting aside foiled madame
and the inmate, bore his charge downstairs, snatched a raincoat from
the hall rack, wrapped it about her, called to the father to come, and
escaped into the street.

After the rescued girl had been restored to her home, and sufficiently
recovered from her terrible experience to give a connected account
of herself, she related the following incidents: Leaving school on
that night she had started for the home of the girl whom she was to
visit--the girl not having attended school that day--and while passing
a house in a respectable residential district, about five o’clock of
the winter evening, darkness already having fallen, a woman came to the
door and in great distress told the girl that a baby was sick, that she
was alone, and implored the girl to come in and care for the baby while
she ran for a doctor. The girl complied, and on reaching the door, was
immediately seized, drawn into the hallway, her cries smothered by a
hand in which there was a handkerchief saturated with chloroform, and
she knew no more until she regained consciousness in the place where
the social worker had rescued her.

Here his direct recital ended. I put to him two or three questions:
Who is the girl? Where is she now? Where is the house into which she
was beguiled? Where is the brothel in which she was imprisoned? He had
answers for all these. The girl’s name could not be divulged, even in
official confidence, for the family could not risk publicity; the house
where she had been summoned to care for the ailing baby was the home of
wealthy and respectable people, who had been out of town at the time,
and their residence had been broken into and used temporarily by the
white slavers. As for the brothel, the social worker, by methods he did
not disclose, had compelled the proprietress to leave the city, and the
place was closed.

Such was the amazing adventure of the social worker. It was easy to
imagine the effect of it when related to neurotic women, to prurient
and sentimental men, and in country churches to gaping yokels curious
about “life” in the city. It was easy to understand the effect it
would have on minds starved and warped by Puritanism, ready for any
sensation, especially one that might stimulate their moral emotions,
and give them one more excuse for condemning the police. No wonder
certain of the elect brethren in gratitude for having been told just
what they wished to hear had contributed hundreds of dollars, that the
“work” might go on!

I determined, therefore, that in one instance, at least, the truth as
to this stock story should be discovered, and I requested Mr. Mooney,
the Director of Public Safety, to make a complete investigation. He
detailed to the task the best of his detectives; the inspectors of the
federal government under the white slave laws were called in, and I
asked two clergymen of my acquaintance who knew the social worker and
said they believed him, to give what aid they could. Together they
worked for weeks. They made an exhaustive investigation, and their
conclusion, in which the clergymen joined, was that there was not the
slightest ground for the silly tale.

It was, of course, simply another variant of the story that had gone
the rounds of the two continents, a story which had been somehow
psychologically timed to meet the hysteria which the pulpit, the press,
and the legislatures had displayed, as had the people, in one of those
strange moral movements which now and then seize upon the public mind,
and, in effect, make the whole population into a mob, which is, of
coarse, the most moral thing in the world. The subject was investigated
in England and it was shown that not one of the stories told in this
cause there had any foundation in fact.[C] So far as I know, no
authentic verification of the story in any of its forms has ever been
made. And yet it was the stock in trade of the professional moralists
and was employed by them in two continents to generate that hysteria
without which they cannot carry on their reforms. It was repeated and
accepted--that is all, and to doubt it was to make oneself _particeps
criminis_, a sort of accessory after the fact.




XLIX


It is a subject which only the student of morbid psychology, I
suppose, can illuminate properly, but I fancy he would find somewhere
a significance in the phrase “white slave,” when acted upon by minds
that had never been refined enough to imagine any but the grossest of
objective crimes, and out of all this there arose a new conception of
the prostitute quite as grotesque as that which it replaced. She was no
longer the ruined and abandoned thing she once was, too vile for any
contact with the virtuous and respectable; she no longer occupied even
the sacrificial pose in which Cato centuries ago and Lecky in our own
time figured her; she was not even that daughter of joy whose dalliance
is the secret despair of moralists too prudent to imitate her abandon;
she became the white slave, a shanghaied innocent kept under lock
and key. And thousands and thousands of her sisters were said to be
trapped every year in precisely the same way by the minions of a huge
system, organized like any modern combination of rapacity and evil,
with luxurious headquarters, presumably in some sky-scraper in New
York, and its own attorneys, agents, kidnappers, crimpers, seducers,
panderers and procuresses all over the land, a vast and complicated
organization, with baffling ramifications in all the high and low
places of the earth. The sensational newspapers referred to it as “the
white slave syndicate,” as though it were as authentic as the steel
trust or Standard Oil. It was even said that somewhere in New York
the trust conducted a daily auction! With such a bizarre notion, the
victims of their own psychic lasciviousness became obsessed. Raids and
“revivals” must be inaugurated, a body of new laws enacted, and a horde
of official inspectors, agents and detectives turned loose on the land,
empowered to arrest any man and woman traveling together, and hold the
man guilty of a felony.

To be sure, it was something to have the conception change. It was
something that the prostitute should at last be regarded with some
touch of human pity. And it was something, a great deal, indeed,
that there was, with all the fanatical and zealous law making, some
quiet study of the problem. The word “economic,” so long scorned
by the proponents of an absolute morality, somehow penetrated the
public consciousness, and at last it dawned on the human mind that
prostitution is related to economic pressure. But, unfortunately, by
the familiar human process, the mind leaped to extremes; it was assumed
that all prostitutes were girls who did not receive sufficient wages,
and the simple and all sufficient cure was to be the minimum wage;
instead of receiving eight dollars a week and going to the bad, all
working girls were to be paid nine dollars a week and remain virtuous.
And of course new work for the constable was cut out; if the employers
of girls did not pay them that much, they were all to go to jail, and
if the girls did not remain chaste after they had been assured of that
splendid income, they must go to the pillory for the godly to spit at.
This, with the laws against white slavery, was to be the panacea, and
prostitution, a problem which had perplexed the thoughtful for thirty
centuries, was to be solved before the autumn primaries, so that those
who solved it might get their political rewards promptly.

I used to wish, when it was presented to me as mayor, that some of
these cock-sure persons who would solve the problem off-hand by
issuing a general order to the police, could get themselves elected
to the opportunity. Of course I issued no general order on the
subject; perhaps I was too skeptical, too much lacking in faith in the
miraculous powers of the constabulary. Our city was like all cities;
there were prostitutes in brothels, prostitutes in saloons, prostitutes
in flats, prostitutes on the streets at night. There were, for
instance, a score or more of disorderly saloons where men and women
congregated. But we found that merely by posting a policeman in uniform
before such a place, its patronage was discouraged, and in a few days
discontinued. Of course it was a dangerous and preposterous power to
wield; in the hands of unscrupulous police it might have appalling
possibilities of evil. I had the idea of stationing a policeman before
a disorderly house from Tom Johnson, who told me he had it from his
father--who was Chief of Police in Louisville. And so we adopted it,
and after a while the wine rooms were no more. And that was something.
But the girls in them, of course, had to go somewhere, just as Jones
said.

Then we found that the police, if they were brutal enough, could drive
the girls off the streets. It seemed to me always a despicable sort
of business--the actions of the police I mean; I didn’t like to hear
the reports of it; I don’t like to think of it, or write of it even
now. It is not very creditable to make war on women, whatever the
Puritans may say. But the streets would show an improvement, even they
would admit; much as they might linger and loiter and leer, the most
seductively pure of them could not get himself “accosted” anywhere
down town at night. Of course, after a while, the poor things would
come back, or others exactly like them would come. Then the police
would have to practice their brutalities all over again. Perhaps they
were not brutal enough; I am not certain. To be sure they were not
as brutal as Augustus with his sumptuary laws, or as Theodosius, or
Valentinian, or Justinian, or Karl the Great, or Peter the Great, or
St. Louis, or Frederick Barbarossa, or the Empress Maria Theresa in
Vienna, or as John Calvin in Geneva, or Cotton Mather in Massachusetts,
with all their tortures and floggings and rackings and brandings
and burnings; or as the English Puritans who used to have bawds
whipped, pilloried, branded and imprisoned and for a second offense
put to death. And even they were not brutal enough, it seems, since
prostitution went right on down the centuries to our times. I suppose
that we might have learned from their failures that prostitution could
not be ended by physical force and brutality. However, when the girls
were driven from the streets, inasmuch as the police did not despatch
them, they still had to go somewhere, and the brothels remained. They
had their own quarter and if it was not a segregated quarter it was
something very like it, since the police bent their efforts to rid
other portions of the city of such places. It was perhaps a tolerated
rather than a segregated district, and after a while the Director of
Public Safety wished to try the experiment of making it a regulated
district as well. I felt that the world was too old and I found myself
too much of its mood to hope that any good could come from any of the
efforts of policemen to dispose of such a problem, but I was glad of
any experiment conducted in sincerity that might make for the better,
and accordingly the Director of Safety put his scheme into operation.
It was not _reglementation_ in the exact European sense, since the
temper of our American people will not acquiesce in that, and, as
I discovered by some inquiries of my own in the principal cities of
Europe, it is not of very valid effect over there. But the Director
adopted most of the familiar requirements of the Parisian _reglement_,
except the examinations, and the registration of those not _en maison_;
he required the proprietresses to report at police headquarters the
presence of new inmates; he forbade them to have minors or male
parasites in the houses, and as far as possible he separated the
business from the saloon business. Any house which ignored his orders
found a policeman posted before it; then it came to time. The result
was, as Mr. Mooney could report in the course of a year, that the
number of brothels had been reduced from over two hundred to thirty and
the number of prostitutes of whom the police had any knowledge, in an
equal proportion. He was very proud when General Bingham complimented
his policemen and their policing, as he was at similar compliments from
the government’s white slave agents.

Superficially this was a very gratifying report, but only
superficially. Five-sixths of the brothels had been closed, but their
inmates had to go somewhere, just as Jones said, and the police found
that clandestine prostitution had proportionately increased; the women
had gone into flats, or hotels, or residences which on occasion could
be made to serve as assignation houses. It may perhaps have improved
the life of the prostitute, made it freer and more human, or perhaps it
indicated that prostitution in America is showing a decadent tendency
toward refinement. But while they had reduced the number of houses
of prostitution, the police discovered that they had not reduced
prostitution in the least, and when, after a trial of four years, I
asked the Director and the Chief of Police what the result of the
experiment had been, they said that, aside from the fact that it seemed
to make for order in the city, and simplified the work of policing, it
had done no good.

The experience was like that of Chicago, where after a police
order prohibiting the sale of liquor in houses of prostitution, it
was found--according to the report of the vice commission--to be
“undoubtedly true that the result of the order has been to scatter
the prostitutes over a wide territory and to transfer the sale of
liquor carried on heretofore in houses to the near-by saloon keepers,
and to flats and residential sections, but it is an open question
whether it has resulted in the lessening of either of the two evils of
prostitution and drink.”

The experience, I think, is probably universal. I used to hear the
systems of regulation used in European cities held up as models by the
pessimistic as the only practical method of dealing with the problem.
Paris was commonly considered as the ideal in this respect; latterly
it is apt to be Berlin. But the fact is that the _reglementation_
which for years and years has been in force in Paris is a failure; the
experience there was precisely what it was in our little city. And from
Berlin, which the well-known German genius for organization has made
the most efficiently governed city in the world, the same failure has
been reported.

In England, on the other hand, there is no regulation; any evening
along Piccadilly, one may see street walkers whom the police never
dream of molesting. It is in part due to the traditional Puritanic
attitude of our northern race, and partly to the respect for personal
liberty that exists in England. There the principle is much more
scrupulously respected than with us, with whom individual liberty
indeed, is hardly a principle at all. With us the phrase “personal
liberty” is regarded merely as a shibboleth of brewers and distillers,
an evidence on the part of him who employs it that he is a besotted
slave to drink and an unscrupulous minion of the rum power. The
interferences practiced daily by our policemen are unknown there,
and if, for instance, it should even be proposed that an enactment
like that in Oklahoma limiting the amount of liquor a man may keep in
his own house, and providing that agents of the state may enter his
domicile at will and make a search, and especially if in the remotest
region of the British Isles there should be an instance of what Walt
Whitman calls “the never ending audacity of elected persons,” such as
is of daily occurrence in that state where these agents enter railway
trains and slit open the valises of travelers in their quest of the
stuff, the whole of the question hour the next afternoon in the House
of Commons would be occupied with indignant interpellations of the home
secretary and the _Times_ could not contain all the letters that would
be written.

Other lands have made other experiments, but everywhere and in all
times the same failure has been recorded, from the efforts of Greece to
control the _hetaerae_ and _dicteriades_ and the severe regulations of
ancient Rome, down to the latest reform administration in an American
city. Nothing that mankind has ever tried has been of the slightest
avail. And now come the vice commissions with their pornographic
reports, and no doubt feeling that they have to propose something
after all the trouble they have gone to, when they have set forth in
tabulated statistics what everybody in the world already knows, they
repeat the old ineptitudes. That is, more law, more hounding by the
police.

The Chicago product is the classic and the model for all of these, and
as the latest and loftiest triumph of the Puritan mind in the realm of
morals and of law, a triumph for which three centuries of innocence
of nothing save humor alone could have prepared it, its own great
masterpiece in morals was at once forbidden circulation in the mails
because of its immorality!

The problem cannot be solved by policemen, even if--as is now
recommended--they be called “morals” police. The word has a reassuring
note of course, possibly by some confused with “moral” police, but
policemen are policemen still. I have seen the _police des moeurs_
in European cities, and they look quite like other policemen. And
all cities in America have had morals police; that is exactly what
our policemen have been, and that is exactly what is the matter with
them. That is, all cities have had detectives especially detailed to
supervise the conduct of the vicious, and they always fail. We had such
a squad in Toledo for years, though it was not called morals police.
It was composed of men, mere men, because we had nothing else but men
to detail to the work. They were honest, decent, self-respecting men
for the most part, who on the whole did very well considering the
salaries they were paid and the task imposed on them. They regulated
vice as well as anybody anywhere could regulate it. But of course they
failed to solve the problem, just as the world for thousands of years
has failed to solve it, with all the machinery of all the laws of all
the lawgivers in history. Solon in Athens tried every known device,
including segregation. He established a state monopoly of houses of
prostitution, confined the _dicteriades_ to a certain quarter of the
city, and compelled them to wear a distinctive dress, but all his
stringent laws had broken down long before Hyperides dramatically
bared the breast of Phryne to the Areopagus. In Rome there was the
most severe regulation in the ancient world and yet--it may be read in
Gibbon--the successive experiments of the law under Augustus, Tiberius,
Caligula, Valerian, Theodosius and Justinian were all failures, and
when the laws were most rigorous and the most rigorously enforced,
immorality was at its height. Charlemagne tried and failed, and though
the sentiment of the age of chivalry and the rise of Christianity
for a while softened the law, under the English Puritans, bawds were
whipped, pilloried, branded and imprisoned, and for a second offense
put to death. France was not behind; under Louis IX., prostitutes
were exiled, and in 1635 an edict in Paris condemned men concerned in
the traffic to the galleys for life, while the women and girls were
whipped, shaved and banished for life. Charles V. in the monastery
at Yuste, trying to make two clocks tick in union, found his efforts
no more vain than his attempts to regulate human conduct, and Philip
II. tried again to do what his father had been unable to accomplish.
Peter the Great was a grim enforcer of the laws, and in Vienna Maria
Theresa was most rigorous with prostitutes, putting them in a certain
garb, and then in handcuffs; she was almost as remorseless in her
treatment of them as was John Calvin in Geneva, which came to have more
prostitutes proportionately than any other city in Europe. Several
modern attempts at annihilation have been made. Saxony tried to do
away with prostitutes, but they exist in Dresden and other cities of
the Kingdom and Hamburg claims to have banished them, but in that Free
and Hanseatic city I was told by an American who was investigating the
subject that there were as many there as elsewhere.




L


And these laws have not only failed, they have not only stimulated and
intensified the evil, but they themselves have created a white slavery
worse than that of the preposterous tales and sentimental twaddle
that circulate among the neurotic, a white slavery worse than any ever
imagined by the most romanticistic of the dime novelists or by the most
superheated of the professional reformers. Every one of these laws has
been devised, written and enacted in the identical spirit with which
the Puritans in Massachusetts branded the red letter on the scarlet
woman. Every one of them is an element of that brutal and amazing
conspiracy by which society makes of the girl who once “goes wrong,”
to use the lightest of our animadversions, a pariah more abhorred and
shunned than if she were a rotting leper on the cliffs of Molokai. She
may be human, alive, with the same feelings that all the other girls
in the world have; she may have within her the same possibilities,
life may mean exactly the same thing to her, she may have youth with
all its vague and beautiful longings, but society thunders at her
such final and awful words as “lost,” “abandoned,” thrusts her beyond
its pale, and causes her to feel that thereafter forever and forever,
there is literally no chance of redemption for her; home, society,
companionship, hope itself, all shut their obdurate doors in her face.
In all the world there are just two places she may go, the brothel, or
the river, and even if she choose the latter, that choice, too, is a
sin. She is “lost” and the awful and appalling lie is thundered in her
astonished ears by the united voices of a prurient and hypocritical
society with such indomitable force and persistence that she must
believe it herself, and acquiesce in its dread finality. And there is
no course open to her but to go on in sin to the end of days whose
only mercy is that they are apt to be brief. No off-hand moralist,
even by exercising his imagination to the last degree of cruelty, has
ever been able to devise such a prison as that. White slave, indeed,
shackled by the heaviest chains the Puritan conscience has yet been
able to forge for others!

Strange, too, since the attitude is assumed by a civilization which
calls itself Christian and preaches that the old law, with its eye for
an eye and its tooth for a tooth, was done away with and lost in a new
and beautiful dispensation. “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no
more.” If the world is ever to solve this problem, it must first of
all apprehend the spirit of this simple and gracious expression, do
away with its old laws, its old cruelties, its old brutalities, its
old stupidities, and approach the problem in that human spirit which I
suspect is so very near the divine. Once in this attitude, this spirit,
society will be in position to learn something from history and from
human experience, something from life itself, and what it will learn
first is that Puritanical laws, the hounding of the police, and all
that sort of thing have never lessened prostitution in the world, but
on the contrary have increased it.

What! Let them go and not do anything to them? Well, yes, if we can’t
think of anything better to do to them than to hurt them a little
more, push them a little farther along the road to that abyss toward
which we have been hustling them. Why is it constantly necessary to do
something _to_ people? If we can’t do anything for them, when are we
going to learn to let them alone? Or must this incessant interference,
this meddling, this mauling and manhandling, go on in the world forever
and ever?

As to what is to be done about it, since all that ever has been
attempted has been so much worse in its effect than if we had never
done anything, I suppose I need not feel so very much ashamed of
confessing my ignorance and saying that I do not know. If it were left
to me I think the first thing I should do is to repeal all the criminal
laws on the subject, beginning with that most savage enactment the
Puritan conscience ever devised, namely, the law declaring certain
children “illegitimate,” a piece of stupid brutality and cruelty that
would make a gorilla blush with shame if it were even suggested in the
African jungle.

Yes, the first thing to do is to repeal all the criminal laws on the
subject. They do no good, and even when it is attempted to enforce
them, the result is worse than futile. I myself, with my own eyes, in
the old police court where I have witnessed so many squalid tragedies,
have seen a magistrate fine a street walker and then suspend the fine
so that, as he explained to her in all judicial seriousness, she
might go out and “earn” enough money to come back and pay it! And not
a person in the court room, so habituated and conventionalized are
we all, ever cracked a smile or apparently saw anything out of the
way--least of all the street walker!

But it would not be enough simply to repeal these laws from the
statute books of the state; it will be necessary to accomplish the
immensely more difficult task of repealing them from the human heart,
where they were written long ago in anger, and hatred, and jealousy and
cruelty and fear, that is in the heat of all the baser passions. What I
am trying to say is that the first step in any reasonable and effective
reform is an entire change of attitude on the subject, and about the
only good to be expected from the agitation about white slavery, with
all its preposterous exaggeration and absurd sensationalism is that
it is perhaps making for a changed attitude, a new conception; if it
will accomplish nothing more than to get the public mind--if there is
a public mind, and not a mere public passion--to view the prostitute
as a human being, very much like all the other human beings in the
world, it will have been worth all it has cost in energy and emotion
and credulity. If this sort of repeal can be made effective, if the
prostitute can be assured of some chance in life outside the dead line
which society so long ago drew for her, the first step will have been
taken.

The next step possibly will be the erection of a single standard of
morals. And this cannot be done by passing a law, or by turning in an
alarm for the police. That means thinking, too, and education, and
evolution, and all the other slow and toilsome processes of which the
off-hand reformers are so impatient. This single standard will have to
be raised first in each individual heart; after that it will become the
attitude of the general mind.

And then the commerce in vice will have to be stopped. I do not mean
prohibited by penal laws alone. Policemen cannot stop it, and policemen
should have no more to do with it than firemen. In fact much of the
commerce has proceeded from the fact that its regulation has been
entrusted to the police. It should be a subject for the fiscal laws. It
is, I assume, known by most persons that the owners of the dilapidated
tenements in which for the most part prostitution is carried on,
because of the “risk,” extort exorbitant rentals for them, and then
on the ground that they can rent them to no one of respectability,
they hold them to be so worthless that they pay little if any taxes on
them. Our present tax laws of course have the effect of rewarding the
slothful, the lazy and the idle, and of punishing the energetic and
the enterprising producer in business, and it would be quite possible
to revise the tax laws so that tenderloins would be economically
impossible, because they would cease to be profitable.

In the next place, or some place in the program, there should be some
sort of competent and judicious sex education. I do not know just who
would impart it, since no one as yet knows very much about it, but with
the earnest, sincere and devoted work that is being carried on all over
the world by the scientific men and women who are studying eugenics and
social hygiene, there is hope in this direction, even if it is probable
that the world will not be saved by the new race of athletes that are
scientifically to be bred, and may still have some use in its affairs
for the minds of its cripples who in all times have contributed so much
to its advancement.

The marvelous phenomenon known as the feminist movement which the
students and historians of the next two hundred years will be busy
elucidating will play its part, too, for in its vast impulse toward the
equality of the sexes it must not only bring the single standard of
morals, but it should somehow be the means of achieving for women their
economic independence. This perhaps would be the most important of all
the steps to be taken in the solution of the problem. The economic
environment of course is in the lives of many girls a determining
factor and in this connection the minimum wage indeed has its bearing.
The old Puritan laws were conceived in minds intensely preoccupied
with the duty of punishing people for their sins. Prostitutes were
prostitutes because they were “bad,” and when people were bad they must
be punished. But now we see, or begin to see, if vaguely, that, except
in metaphysics, there is no such thing in our complex human life as an
absolute good or an absolute bad; we begin to discern dimly the causes
of some of the conduct called bad, and to the problem of evil we begin
to apply the conception of economic influences, social influences,
pathological influences, and other influences most of us know little or
nothing about.

Thus we begin to see that a girl’s wages, for instance, may have
something to do with what we call her morals; not everything, but
something. The wages of a girl’s father have something to do with
them, too, and the wages of her great grandfather for the matter of
that. So the dividends on which live the delicate and charming ladies
she beholds alighting from their motor cars every morning in the
shopping district may have something to do with them, though she is as
unconscious and as innocent of the relation as they, as ignorant as all
of us are. Rents have something to do with them, and so do taxes.

But after the whole economic system has been re-adjusted and perfected
and equalized, after we have the minimum wage, and the single tax, and
industrial democracy, and every man gets what he produces, and economic
pressure has been as scientifically adjusted as the atmospheres
in a submarine torpedo boat, there is always the great law of the
contrariety of things to be reckoned with, according to which the
more carefully planned the event, the less it resembles the original
conception. The human vision is so weak, and the great circle of
life so prodigious! The solution will come, if it ever comes at all,
by slow, patient, laborious, drudging study, far from the midnight
session of the legislature, far from the ear and the pencil of the
eager reporter, far from the platform of the sweating revivalist, far
from the head office of the police. Our fondly perused pornography
might expose the whole of the underworld to the light of day, the
general assembly might enact successive revisions of the revised
statutes for a hundred years, we might develop the most superb police
organization in all history, achieving the apotheosis of the Puritan
ideal with a dictagraph in every bedroom and closet in the town, and
it all would be of no avail. The study must survey the whole field
of social and domestic relations, until the vast mystery of life is
understood, and the relation between its wide antitheses established
as Tolstoy presents them in his story of the poor mother who took her
daughter to the public house in the village, and the rich mother who,
at the same time, took her daughter to the court at St. Petersburg.
It will be found perhaps in the long run, for which so few are ever
willing to remain, that the eradicable causes of prostitution are
due to involuntary poverty, and the awful task is to get involuntary
poverty out of the world. It is a task which has all the tremendous
difficulties of constructive social labor and it is as deliberate as
evolution itself. And even if it is ever accomplished, there will
remain a residuum in the problem inhering in the mysteries of sex,
concerning which even the wisest and most devoted of our scientists
will confess they know very little as yet and have not much to tell us
that will do us any good.




LI


In taking the present occasion to say so much about the work in morals
which a mayor is expected to perform, I have a disquieting sense that
I have fallen into a tone too querulous for the subject, and perhaps
taken a mean advantage of the reader in telling of my troubles. It is
rather a troubled life that a mayor leads in one of these turbulent
American cities, since so much of his time is taken up by reformers who
seem to expect him somehow to do their holy work for them, and yet that
is doubtless the business of reformers in this world, and since it is
their mission to trouble someone, perhaps it is the business of a mayor
to be troubled by them in his vicarious and representative capacity. I
should not deny reformers their rights in this respect, or their uses
in this world, and I should be the last to question their virtues.
John Brown was beyond doubt a strong character and an estimable man,
who did a great and heroic work in the world, even if he did do it in
opposition to the law, and by the law was killed at last for doing it,
but by all accounts he must have been a terrible person to live with,
and I have often been glad that I was not mayor of Ossawattomie when
he was living and reforming there. I would as soon have had Peter the
Hermit for a constituent.

I shall not go quite so far as to admit that our reformers were as
strong in character as either of these great models I have mentioned,
but they were as persistent, or in combination they were as persistent;
when one tired or desisted, another promptly took his place; there
were so many that they could spell each other, and work in relays, and
thus keep the torch ever alive and brandishing. It was not only the
social evil with which they were concerned, but the evil of drink, and
the evil of gambling, and the evil of theaters, and the evil of moving
pictures, and post cards, and of the nude in art, and of lingerie in
show windows, and of boys swimming in the river, and playing in the
streets, and scores of other conditions which seemed to inspire in them
the fear or the thought of evil.

With the advent of spring, the mayor must put a stop to lovers
wandering in the parks; when summer comes he must put an end instantly
to baseball; in the winter he must close the theaters and the dance
halls; in short, as I said before, whenever it was reported from any
quarter that there were people having fun, the police must instantly be
despatched to put a stop to it.

And strangely enough, even when we did succeed in doing away with
some of the evils of the town, when we closed the saloons promptly at
midnight, the hour fixed by ordinance, when we did away with many evil
resorts, when wine rooms were extirpated, and the number of _maisons
de tolerance_ were reduced by eighty-five per cent., when gambling was
stamped out, their complaints did not subside, but went on, unabated,
the same as before. They could not be satisfied because the whole of
their impossible program was not adopted, and more because there was
no public recognition of their infallibility and no admission of their
righteousness. What that type of mind desires is not, after all, any
reasonable treatment of those conditions, or any honest and sincere
endeavor to deal with them. It demands intellectual surrender, the
acknowledgment of its infallibility, and a protesting hypocrite can
more easily meet its views than anyone else.

No wonder then that even such a strong man as Tom Johnson, one evening,
when the day was done, should fling himself back in the motor car, with
the dark shadow of utter weariness and despair on his face, and say:

“I wish I could take a train to the end of the longest railway in the
world, then go as far as wagons could draw me and then walk and crawl
as far as I could, and then in the midst of the farthest forest lie
down and rest.”

We all have such moments, of course, but we should have fewer of them
if we had a national trait of which I have read, in a book by Mr.
Fielding Hall in relation to Burma. He says the Burmese have a vast
unwillingness to interfere in other people’s affairs.

“A foreigner may go and live in a Burman village,” he says, “may
settle down there and live his own life and follow his own customs in
perfect freedom; may dress and eat and drink and pray and die as he
likes. No one will interfere. No one will try to correct him; no one
will be forever insisting to him that he is an outcast, either from
civilization or from religion. The people will accept him for what
he is and leave the matter there. If he likes to change his ways and
conform to Burmese habits and Buddhist forms, so much the better; but
if not, never mind.”

What a hell Burma would be for the Puritan! And what a heaven for
everybody else! Perhaps we would all better go live there.

These things, however, should be no part of a mayor’s business,
and perhaps I may justify my speaking of them by saying that I
spoke of them principally to make that point clear. They and some
other problems that may or may not be foreign to his duties, have
the effect of keeping a mayor from his real work which is or should
be, the administration of the communal affairs of the city, and
not the regulation of the private affairs of the people in it.
It is quite impossible to imagine any work more delightful than
this administration. Hampered in it as one is by politicians, who
regard every question from the viewpoint of the parish pump, it
is nevertheless inspiring to be concerned about great works of
construction regarding the public comfort and convenience, the public
health and the public amenities. It is in such work that one may catch
a glimpse of the vast possibilities of our democracy, of which our
cities are the models and the hope.

I have observed in Germany that the mayors of the cities there are
not burdened by these extraneous issues, and I think that that is
the reason the German cities are the most admirably administered in
the world. Perhaps I should say governed, too, though that is hardly
correct, since the governing there is done by the state through its own
officials. I have not been in Germany often enough or remained long
enough to be able to assert that government, in its effect for good,
is quite as much a superstition as it is everywhere; mere political
government, I mean, which seems to be so implicitly for the selfish
benefit of those who do the governing. But the administration of
public affairs is so entirely another matter, that it is as beautiful,
at least in its possibilities as government is ugly in its actualities,
and it is precisely because there has been so much insistence on
government in our cities that there is as yet so little administration,
and that so inefficient.

In Germany the burgomeister is not chosen for his political views,
or for his theories of any sort, or for his popularity; he is chosen
because of his ability for the work he is to perform, and he is
retained in office as long as he performs that work properly. It is so
with all municipal departments and the result is order and efficient
administration. When a German city wants a mayor, it seeks one by
inquiring among other cities; sometimes it advertises for him. It
would be quite impossible, of course, for our cities to advertise for
mayors, not that there would be any lack of applicants, since everyone
is considered capable of directing the affairs of a city in this
country. Of course everyone is not capable; few of the persons chosen
are capable at the time they are chosen. Many of them become very
capable after they have had experience, but they gain this experience
at the expense of the public, and about the time they have gained it,
their services are dispensed with, and a new incompetent accidentally
succeeds them.

The condition is due partly to the fact that we are of a tradition that
is concerned with governing exclusively, and not administering; our
conception is of an executive, a kind of lieutenant or subaltern of
the sovereign power, and in our proverbial fear and jealousy of kings
we see that he does not have too much power or develop those powers he
has by a long tenure of office.

The officials of a German city are pure administrators, and nothing
else; they are not governors or censors. They are not charged in fact
with police powers at all. And if they were, they would not have
questions of such delicacy to meet, for the police there are for the
purpose of protecting life and property, and they are not expected to
regulate the personal conduct and refine the morals of the community,
or to rear the young. They have not confused their functions with
the _censores mores_ of old Rome, or like us, with the beadles of
New England villages of colonial times. That is, the Puritan spirit
is not known there, at least in the intensified acerbity in which it
exists with us; moral problems, oddly enough, are left to parents,
teachers or pastors. The police over there are generally a part of
the military organizations. It would be better of course, to bear the
ills we have than to transplant any military system to our soil, for
state police in America would become mere Cossacks employed to keep the
laboring population in subjection. But if the state is to undertake
to regulate the moral conduct of the inhabitants of cities, it should
provide all the means of regulation and take all the responsibility,
including the onus of violating the democratic principle. If the state
is to regenerate the land by the machinery of morals police, it should
have its own morals police, tell them just how to proceed to compel
the inhabitants of cities to be moral, and pay them out of the state
treasury.




LII


It is, however, a curious characteristic of our people, or of the vocal
minority of them, that while they insist on every possible interference
with every private and personal right, in the field of moral conduct,
they nevertheless will tolerate no interference whatever with property
rights. Thus it was precisely as Cossacks that many employers of labor
insisted on my using the police to cow their workmen whenever there was
a strike.

During my first term it befell that our city was torn by strikes,
all the union machinists in town walked out, then the moulders, and
at last a great factory wherein automobiles were made was “struck,”
as the workingmen say. It is impossible to give an idea of the worry
such a condition causes officials. It is more than that sensation
of weariness, of irritation, even of disgust, which it causes the
general public. This is due partly to the resentment created by the
interference with physical comfort, and even peace of mind, since there
is in us all something more than a fear of disorder and tumult, in that
innate love of harmony which exists potentially in humanity. But to the
official there is a greater difficulty because of the responsibility to
which he is held. People intuitively regard strikers as public enemies,
and while the blame for the irritation caused by strikes is visited
on the direct and apparent cause, that is, the strikers themselves; it
is visited, too, on the official head of the local government, who is
supposed to be able somehow to put a stop to such things. The general
or mass intelligence will not as yet go much deeper than the superfices
of the problem, or seek to understand the causes of economic unrest and
disorder; it still thinks in old sequences and puts its trust in the
weapons of the flesh.

I think I shall never forget the first call I had from a delegation
of manufacturers during the early days of those strikes. They came in
not too friendly spirit, but rather in their capacity of “citizens
and tax-payers,” standing on their rights, as they understood them,
though they in common with most of us and with the law as well, had
only the most hazy notions as to what those rights were, and perhaps
still hazier notions as to their duties. “We come,” said the spokesman,
“representing two millions of dollars’ worth of property.”

They could not have put their case more frankly. But I, as I was able
to recall in that moment, represented two hundred thousand people,
themselves among them of course. And here at the very outset was the
old conflict in its simplest terms, of man against property. Now,
in that old struggle, while I had made no sacrifices in the cause
and have been of no especial service in it, I had nevertheless given
intellectual assent to the general propositions advanced in favor of
the human side, the side of man. By prejudice, or perversity, or
constitutionally, I considered men of more value than factories. I had
perhaps never heard of a strike, for instance, in which my sympathies
were not impulsively with the strikers. I could always see that poor
foreigner, whose body had lain there on the cold damp rocks at Lemont
so many years before, and somehow I could not get out of my mind’s eye
the figures of the workmen on strike, many of them hungry and desperate
as their wives and children were; they seemed to me to be in straits
more dire than their harried and harassed and worried employers, though
I could feel sorry for them, too, since even if they were not hungry,
they, too, were the victims of the anarchy of our industrial system.
They had of course no social conscience whatever, but perhaps they
could not help that. But there they were, bringing their troubles to
the mayor, whom perhaps they did not wholly regard as their mayor,
since they had some prescience of the fact that in that mayor’s mind
was always the memory of those throngs of workingmen who had looked up
to him with some of the emotions of confidence and hope. There was alas
little enough that he could do for those workingmen, but, especially in
such an hour, he must at least not forget them. Of the relative rights
of their present quarrel he had little knowledge; but he had envisaged
enough of life to know, without too much sentimentalizing them, that,
while they were often wrong, they were somehow right when they were
wrong. That is, their eternal cause was right.

What the manufacturers wanted, as they put it, was “protection,” a
term with vague and varying connotations. As was the case in all the
strikes of all the years of my experience in the mayoralty, they felt
that the police were not sufficiently aggressive, or that the Chief of
Police had not detailed sufficient men to afford them protection. I
did not raise the question, though it occurred to me, as to what the
police were doing to protect the strikers, who were citizens, too, and
tax-payers, or at least rent-payers and so indirect tax-payers, but
when I asked the Chief, the big-hearted Perry Knapp reported that the
strikers were complaining, too, and out of his collection of works
on Lincoln, he brought me one which contained a letter the great
president wrote to General John M. Schofield, when he assigned that
officer to the command of the Department of the Missouri, in May, 1863,
to succeed General Curtis. Curtis had been the head of one party as
Governor Gamble had been the head of the other, in what Lincoln called
the pestilent factional quarrel into which the Union men had entered.
“Now that you are in the position,” wrote Lincoln, “I wish you to undo
nothing merely because General Curtis or Governor Gamble did it, but to
exercise your own judgment, and do right for the public interest. Let
your military measures be strong enough to repel the invader and keep
the peace, and not so strong as to unnecessarily harass and persecute
the people. It is a difficult rôle, and so much the greater will be the
honor if you perform it well. If both factions, or neither, shall abuse
you, you will probably be about right. Beware of being assailed by one
and praised by the other.”

How Lincoln knew human nature! It seemed as good a model as one
might find, since we, too, were in the midst of a little civil war,
and we always tried to pursue that course. What the manufacturing
employers wished, of course, was for us to use the police to break
the strike; that we did not deem it our duty to do. What we tried to
do was to preserve the public peace and--since our industry in its
present status is war--to let them fight it out. We tried to see to
it that they fought it out along the lines laid down, in fixing the
relative rights of the industrial belligerents, by the Courts of Great
Britain, and this policy had the virtual approval of our own courts
when in an ancillary way it came under discussion there. But we had
difficulty in maintaining the peace, not only because the strikers,
or more likely their sympathizers, broke it now and then, but because
when the strikers were not breaking it, the employers seemed bent
on doing something to make them. They did not intend it for that
purpose of course; they simply thought in old feudal sequences. They
hired mercenaries, bullies provided as “guards” by private detective
agencies. It kept the police pretty busy disarming these guards, and
greatly added to their labors because the guards were always on the
point of hurting some one.




LIII


There was one of the employers, indeed, who grew so alarmed that he
came one morning to the office predicting a riot at his plant, that
very afternoon at five o’clock, when the works were to shut down for
the day. This man was just then operating his factory with strike
breakers and he was concerned for their safety. Indeed his concern was
expressed in the form of a personal sympathy and love for them which
was far more sentimental than any I had ever been accused of showing
toward workingmen. He was concerned about their inalienable right
to work, and about their wives and little children, and about their
comfort and peace of mind; indeed it was such a concern, such a love,
that, had he but shown the moiety of it to his former employees, they
never could have gone out on strike at all.

At five o’clock that day then, with the Chief of Police, I visited
the plant to observe, and if possible to prevent the impending riot.
The works had not yet closed for the day, but in the street before
the black and haggard and ugly buildings where they had toiled, the
strikers were gathered, and with them their wives, with bare and brawny
forearms rolled in their aprons, and their children clinging timorously
about their skirts. It was a gray and somber afternoon in spring,
but there was in the crowd a kind of nervous excitement that might
have passed for gayety, a mood that strangely travestied the holiday
spirit; perhaps they regarded the strike as an opportunity for the
sensation lacking in their monotonous lives. There were several hulking
fellows loafing about whom the Chief of Police recognized as private
detectives, and as a first step in preventing disorder, he ordered
these away. Presently the whistle blew its long, lugubrious blast, the
crowd gathered in closer groups, and a silence fell. Sitting there with
the Chief in his official buggy, I waited; the great gates of the high
stockade swung slowly open, and then there issued forth a vehicle,
the like of which I had never seen before, a sort of huge van, made
of rough boards, that might have moved the impedimenta of an embassy.
In the rear there was a door, fastened with a padlock; the sides were
pierced with loop holes, and on the high seat beside the driver sat an
enormous guard, with a rifle across his knees. This van, this moving
arsenal containing within its mysterious interior the strike breakers,
and I was told other guards ready to thrust rifles through those loop
holes, moved slowly out of those high gates, lurched across the gutter
into the street, and rumbled away, and as it went it was followed by
a shout of such ridicule that even the guard on the front seat lost
his menacing gravity and smiled himself, perhaps with some dawning
recognition of the absurdity of the whole affair.

There was no riot, though when the employer came to see me the next day
I could assure him of my surprise that there had been none, since there
was an invitation to disorder almost irresistible in that solemn and
absurd vehicle, with its rifles and loop holes and guards and cowering
mystery within. And I could urge upon him too a belated recognition of
the immutable and unwritten law by which such an invitation to trouble
is sure to be accepted. I almost felt, I told him, like heaving a stone
after it myself to see what would happen. He finally agreed with me,
dismissed his guards, and dismantled his rolling arsenal, and not long
afterward was using its gear to haul the commodities they were soon
manufacturing in those shops again.

And the strikes in the other plants were settled or compromised, or
wore themselves out, or in some way got themselves ended, though not
the largest and most ominous of them, that in the automobile works,
until my friend Mr. Marshall Sheppey and I had worked seventy-two
hours continuously to get the leaders of the opposing sides together.
It was an illuminating experience for both of us, and not without its
penalties, since thereafter we were called upon to arbitrate a dozen
other strikes. We found both sides rather alike in their humanness, and
one as unreasonable as the other, but we found too that if we could
keep them together long enough, their own reason somehow prevailed and
they reached those fragile compromises which are the most we may expect
in the present status of productive industry in this world.

The old shop of Golden Rule Jones had its strike with the rest of them,
and yet a strange and significant fate befell it. Alone of all the
other shops and factories in the city involved in that strike, it was
not picketed by the strikers, they did not even visit it, so far as I
know. There were no guards and no policemen needed. And when I asked
one of the labor leaders to account for this strange oversight, this
surprising lack of solidarity and discipline in their ranks, he said,
as though he must exculpate himself: “Oh well, you know--Mayor Jones.
We haven’t forgotten him and what he was.”




LIV


It was because of this attitude toward workingmen, and their cause,
that I was accused, now and then, by those who knew nothing about
Socialism, of being a Socialist; by those who did know about it I was
condemned for not being one. Our movement indeed had no opponents in
the town more bitter than the Socialists, that is the authentic and
orthodox Socialists of the class-conscious Marxist order, and they
opposed me so insistently that I might as well have been the capitalist
class and had done with it. I do not intend to confuse myself with
the movement of which I, for a while, was but the merest and weakest
of human instruments; I speak in that personal sense only because the
opposition was of a personal quality so intense that it could hardly
have been expected of an attitude that was always insisted upon as so
entirely impersonal, the cold and scientific attitude of minds that had
comprehended the whole of human history, analyzed the whole amazing
complexity of human life, and reduced its problems to that degree
in which they were all to be solved by a formula so brief that it
could be printed on a visiting card. The complaint these scientists
made of our movement was that its ameliorations in city life were
retarding that evolution of which they were the inspired custodians and
conservators; some of them spoke of it as though it were but a darkling
part of that vast conspiracy against mankind in which the capitalists
were so shamelessly engaged. If we had only let things alone, it was
urged, they might grow so desperate that no one but the Socialists
would be capable of dealing with the appalling situation.

But this was the attitude only of that coterie which, unselfishly,
no doubt, with the purest of motives, and only until the industrial
democracy could be organized and rendered sufficiently class-conscious
to take over the work, was directing the destinies of the Socialist
party, very much to the fleshly eye in the same manner that the
Republican machine controlled that party or the Democratic machine its
party, or, before we were done, certain persons attempted to control
the Independent movement. So far as I could discern, there was not
much difference in them all; the Socialists seemed to rely on all the
old weapons that had so long been employed in the world, and so long
failed; they seemed to contemplate nothing more than replacement of old
orthodoxies with new, old tyrannies with new tyrannies; in a word, to
preserve the old vicious circle in which humanity has been revolving
impotently and stupidly down all the grooves of time.

I could not have been a Socialist because life had somehow taught me
that this is a world of relativities, in which the absolute is the
first impossibility. I could share, of course, their hope, or the
hope of some of them in a well ordered society, though with many of
them the dream seemed to be beautiful chiefly because they expected
to order it themselves; they who felt themselves so long to have been
the slaves were to become the masters; their hard and too logical
theory of classes circumscribed their vision so that they could imagine
nothing more clearly, and possibly nothing more delightful than a
bouleversement which would leave them on top.

I could recognize with them the masters under whom we all alike were
serving in this land, and respect them as little as we might, or
detest them as we would, they presented whatever advantage there is in
familiarity; if nothing more inviting than a change in masters were
proposed, one would prefer those one had to others whose habits and
whims he did not know. One could be pretty sure that the new masters
would use the same old whips and scorpions, or if new ones, with a
sting more bitter. They proposed as much, indeed, in their rigid form
of organization, with a discipline more irksome and relentless, what
with their signing of pledges, and their visitations and committees
of inspection, and trials for heresy and excommunications. They
reminded me of those prosecutors who could behold no defect in the
penal machinery save that it had not been sufficiently drastic; they
would replace all old intolerances and ancient tyrannies by others no
different save that they were employed in the opposing cause, and were
to be even more intolerant and tyrannical.

That is, the Socialists provided for everything in the world except
liberty, and to one whose dissolving illusions had left nothing but the
dream of liberty in a world where liberty was not and probably never
was to be, there was no allure in the proposal to take away even the
dream of liberty.

None of them of course would be impressed by these objections--was not
the great cure for social ill written and printed on a card?--nor would
they consider them even until they had been submitted to the prescribed
test of a joint debate, about the most futile device ever adopted
by mankind, and a nuisance as offensive as any that ever disturbed
society. It was of course the only amusement they had, as popular as
running the gauntlet was with the Indians, and they liked to torture a
capitalist to make a Socialist holiday. It is of course quite useless
to argue with one who is always right, one whose utterances have the
authority of revealed truth, but inasmuch as society had not yet been
developed to a point of communal efficiency sufficient to keep the
streets clean, it seemed idle to undertake the communal control of
production and distribution. And however wrong I may be in every other
thing, I am quite sure that I am right in this, that in their analysis
of society they have failed utterly to take into account that classic
of the ironic spirit, the great law of the contrariety of things,
according to which the expected never happens, at least in the way
it was expected to happen, and nothing ever turns out the way it was
planned.

But there is a more fundamental law--that of the destructive power
of force, which always defeats itself. For their reliance was on
force--and how quietly they, or the most virile of them, entered upon
their last phase in their acceptance of the doctrine of force as
preached now everywhere by the I. W. W. agitator on the curbstone!
Sometimes after all the law does not take a thousand years to work
itself out.

It seemed to me that the single-taxers had a scheme far better
than that of the Socialists, since they suggested a reliance on
the democratic, and not on the authoritarian theory, though in its
mysterious progress, in its constant development of new functions,
democracy may be expected to modify even that theory. I fear at least
that it would not do away with mosquitoes; possibly not even with
reformers.




LV


But I would not be unfair, and I counted many friends among the
Socialists of my town and time whose best ideals one could gladly
share. They were immensely intelligent, or immensely informed; they had
made a fairly valid indictment against society as it is organized, or
disorganized. But like Mr. H. G. Wells, who calls himself a Socialist,
these exceptions, in Mr. Wells’s words, were by no means fanatical or
uncritical adherents. To them as to him Socialism was a noble, and yet
a very human and fallible system of ideas. To them, as, again to him,
it was an intellectual process, a project for the reshaping of human
society upon new and better lines--the good will of the race struggling
to make things better. This broad and tolerant view was the one to
which they held, though they seemed too closely to identify all the
good will in the race, operating, as I believe it to be, in many ways
and through many agencies, as Socialism, and the pontifical Socialism
taught in our town, at least, was so explicitly a class hatred that
most of the time it was anything in the world rather than good will.
Anyone with a good heart could be a Socialist on Mr. Wells’s terms,
if it were not his inevitable fate to be assured by the orthodox
custodians of the party faith, the high priests who alone could enter
the holy of holies and bear forth, as occasion required, the ark of the
covenant, that Mr. Wells’s Socialism is no Socialism at all and that he
is no man to consult or accept.

My friends among them were like him in the condemnation they had to
hear from the machine, or, perhaps I should say, the governing or
directing committee--whatever the euphemism that cloaks the familiar
phenomenon with them--they too were said to be no Socialists at all;
they were mere “intellectuals” or “sentimentalists,” or easily fell
into some other of the categories the Socialists have provided for
every manifestation of life. They have doubtless rendered society a
service by their minute classification; which seems complete if they
would only recognize the order of the sectarian mind, and since the
orthodox among them afford so typical an example, include themselves
in it. I am not sure that it is not quite as distinct a species as the
capitalist class itself, at least it causes as much trouble in the
world as the Socialists say the capitalist class creates. Socialists,
at least of the impossibilist wing, evangelists, prohibitionists,
Puritans, policemen and most of the rest of the reformers are endowed
with this order of mind. While they all form subdivisions of a distinct
intellectual class of humanity these are generally the same. That is,
they are, all of them, always under all circumstances, right. All of
these classes, fundamentally, follow the same sequences of thought.
They differ of course in minor details, but they always meet on that
narrow strip of ground upon which they have erected their inflexible
model for humanity, with just room enough by its side for the scaffold
upon which to hang those who do not accept it.

Now, when, by any coincidence, the representatives of any two of
these species meet in the mistaken supposition that there is any
disagreement between them, there is bound to be trouble of course, and
whenever say a Socialist of the impossibilist wing of the party, and
a policeman--and all good policemen are impossibilists--meet, we have
posited the old problem in physics of an irresistible body meeting an
impenetrable substance.

This phenomenon occurred on two or three occasions when policemen
interfered with Socialists speaking in the streets. I am sure the
Socialists in question could have regretted the circumstance no
more than I, for if there was one right which I tried to induce the
police to respect, it was the right of free speech. On the whole they
did fairly well, and at a time when there seemed to be an epidemic
of ferocity among municipal officials in the land that led them to
all sorts of unwarranted interferences with human and constitutional
rights, we had folk of all sorts preaching their strange doctrines
in our streets--Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, of their several
sorts, I. W. W.’s, evangelists, anarchists, suffragists, Mormons,
Salvationists, to say nothing of all the religious sects; wisdom was
veritably crying in the streets. Emma Goldman, during that period of
hysteria when the advent of that little woman in a city precipitated a
siege of fear, delivered her course of lectures in Toledo to audiences
that were very small, since there were no police to insure the
attendance of those who were interested more in sensations than in her
philosophic discussions of the German drama. And we tried to respect
the rights of all.

But it is one thing to give orders, and another to have them implicitly
obeyed. Those of the indurated sectarian mind, who would order all
life by mechanism, are given to saying that if they were in authority
the police would do so and so, and would not do such and such a thing,
that they would have the police see to this and that, etc., etc.,
etc. After they had been in power a while they would grow humble,
if not discouraged, and, like me, be gratified if they succeeded in
accomplishing about one-third of what they had hoped and planned
to accomplish. Thus I, who had tried to give everybody the right of
free speech, was now and then chagrined to find that someone had been
interfered with for preaching some new heresy.

The right of free speech cherished by all and exercised by none, since,
owing to a disposition on the part of humanity to apply the hemlock
or the noose in such cases, few say what they actually think, is one
which certain of the Socialists preferred to have honored in the breach
rather than in the observance. They would be never so happy, never
so much in their element as when their address was interrupted; the
greater the interference, the more acute the suffering for the cause,
and when a man begins to feel that there is in him the blood of the
martyrs, which, as he has heard somewhere, is the seed of the churches,
why, of course, he is in such an exalted state of mind that there is no
human way of dealing with him.

And then that strange human spark, that mysterious thing we call
personality, is always there--that element which makes impossible
any perfectly or ideally organized state, social or otherwise. It is
assumed by those of the order of mind under notice that it is possible
so to organize human affairs that they will work automatically, with
the precision of a machine, that they will work just as they are
intended to work and in no other way, that it is, indeed, impossible
for them to work in any other way, and that it may be predicted long in
advance exactly how they will work at any given instant and under any
exigency, or circumstance. This, of course, is impossible, as everybody
knows, except the impossibilists. That is why they are impossibilists.

These speakers, however, who would dehumanize everything yet cannot
after all dehumanize themselves, would frequently court arrest in the
belief that the meed of pseudo-martyrdom thereby made possible was
an ornament to their cause, and they would often try the patience
of officers, who like the speakers themselves and all of us, are
unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, only human. Thus a Socialist
speaker standing on his soap box, in the course of his remarks,
indulged in certain reflections on the police as an institution.
His sentiments in that respect were not perhaps heterodox, from the
standpoint of my own orthodoxy, but we had been trying to create
_esprit de corps_ in the police department, and the policeman on that
beat chancing to arrive at that inauspicious moment, and viewing life
from an altitude less lofty and impersonal than the Socialist claimed
for his outlook, took the scientific statements of the Socialist not in
the academic sense, but as a personal reflection upon the body of which
he, it seems, was growing rather proud of being a member, and at the
conclusion of the effort he privately informed the speaker that if he
said anything more against the Toledo Police Department he would “knock
his block off.” He was reprimanded by his lieutenant, even after he had
explained that he intended to execute his rude intention in his private
and not in his official capacity.

The incident could be represented by the Socialists as a veritable
reflection of the views of the administration on the important subject
of Socialism, but they could not derive quite the satisfaction from
it they had in another incident, or accident, which befell the most
prominent and authoritative of their local leaders. He was speaking
one evening in a crowded street, when he had the good fortune to be
arrested by a captain of police. He made the occasion the opportunity
for an edifying debate, and lingered as long as the captain would let
him; but, in the end, was led to the police headquarters. This was the
irresistible meeting the impenetrable. While everybody had a right to
speak his mind in the streets, everybody else, we felt, had an equal
right not to listen, even to free speech, and the police had orders to
keep the streets and sidewalks clear for traffic. Now this captain was
a chap who carried out orders given to him, and, as he was in command
of the traffic squad, traffic was his specialty. If streets were to
be cleared, then, in his philosophy, they were to be cleared, and no
little thing like a constitutional inhibition against the abridgment
of human speech would stand in his way. And then, after all, police
are more apt to arrest people they do not like than those they do,
and no one likes those who disagree with him. But after the arrest,
the offender is turned out without chances of reparation. In this
instance, feeling that the Socialist had had an indignity put upon
him by his arrest, while I could not undo what had been done, I could
order his release and tender him an official apology in writing, which
was accepted, though not acknowledged. And an order was issued that
a policemen who thereafter interfered with any voice crying in the
wilderness should be dismissed from the department.




LVI


As a boy, thirty years ago, I used to observe, with a boy’s interest,
the little bob-tailed street cars that went teetering and tinkling, at
intervals of half an hour, out a long street that ran within a block
of my home. I watched the cars intently, and so intently that the
impressions of their various colors, sounds and smells have remained
with me to this day, speaking, in a way, of the conditions of a small
American city of that time, and affording a means by which to measure
that progress in material efficiency which is so often mistaken for
progress in speculative thought.

It may have been that my interest was intensified by the fact that down
in Urbana Street cars were unknown, though they were not unimagined,
since we used to see them when we went to Cincinnati, and I could then,
and I can still, recall, though time has softened the poignancy of that
hour, the pain of parting with a certain noble horse which my father
sold to a man of dark and hateful aspect, and of the morsel of comfort
I derived from the stipulation, invalid enough to be sure, my father
made with the dealer, that the horse was not to be put to street-car
service. That, by my father, and so by me myself, was held to be the
most cruel, degrading and ignoble fate that could befall a horse.
But another reason for my interest was the possession of a curiosity
to which the passing show has always been novel, generally amusing,
sometimes pleasing and often saddening, too--a curiosity in life which
I hope will endure fresh and wholesome until life’s largest curiosity
shall be satisfied at the end of life.

The progress of the little street car under notice was leisurely and
deliberate, sometimes it would wait obligingly for a woman, half a
block away, who hurried puffing, and fluttering, and waving, to reach
the street corner, and when she had clambered aboard, the driver
would slowly unwind his brake, cluck to his horse, the rope traces
would strain and the car would bowl along. Ten blocks away from the
business section, or a few blocks further on, the little car with its
five windows and small hooded platform would enter upon a bare, though
expectant scene of vacant lots, and about a mile out, where there
was some lonely dwelling staring blankly and reproachfully as though
it had been misled, and then abandoned, and further on a few small,
expectant cottages, the long, low street-car barn was reached, the car
was driven on to a little turntable, slowly turned about and started
back. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I had a chance to witness the change
of horses, and to experience a nebulous pity for the nag that ambled
contentedly into the stable, and did not seem to be very tired after
all.

On Summit Street there were grander cars, each drawn by two horses,
and there were other lines in town, each with its cars painted a
distinguishing color. There was one line that went out Collingwood
Avenue, far to the very country itself; its cars bowled under noble
trees and even past a stately mansion or two, or what in those days
seemed stately mansions, and it was pleasant, it was even musical,
to hear the tinkle of the bell on the horse’s collar. Then there
was still another line that ran down the broad Maumee River, almost
to Maumee Bay and the “marsh” where the French _habitants_ lived,
and spoke delightfully like the people in Dr. Drummond’s poems. On
Saturday mornings my father was likely to send me on an errand to a
superannuated clergyman who lived down there, and this involved a long,
irritating journey. The journey occupied the whole morning, and spoiled
a holiday. And then it was always cold, for, in the not too clear
retrospect, I seem to have been sent on this particular errand only
in winter, and the car was the coldest place in the world, especially
when it got down where the winds from the icy lake could strike it.
Its floor was strewn recklessly with yellow straw, in some ironical
pretense of keeping the car warm, and I would sit there with feet
slowly freezing in the rustling straw, and after I had inspected the
two or three passengers, there was nothing to do but to read the notice
over the fare-box in the front end of the car, until I had it quite by
heart:

“The driver will furnish change to the amount of Two Dollars, returning
the full amount, thus enabling the passenger to put the exact fare in
the box.”

Then I could peer up toward the fare-box and look at the one nickel
stranded half-way down its zig-zag chute, and look at the driver,
standing on the front platform, slowly rocking from one foot to the
other, bundled up in old overcoats, with his cap pulled down and his
throat and chin muffled in a repulsive woolen scarf, hoary with the
frost of his breath, and nothing of him visible except the shining
red point of his frosted nose. His hands, one holding the reins, the
other the brake-handle, were lost in the various strata of mittens that
marked epochs co-extensive with those of the several overcoats. I had
read once in a newspaper of a street-car driver in Indianapolis who, at
the end of his run, never moved, but kept right on standing there, and
when the barn-boss swore at him, it was found that he was dead, frozen
at his post. And I sometimes wondered, as I dwelt on that fascinating
horror, if it were possible that sometime, when the car reached the
bay, this driver would not be found frozen. Sometimes I expected to
be found frozen myself, but nothing exciting ever happened on that
journey, and so, somehow, the trips out other streets and other avenues
in other cars, remain more pleasantly in the memory, associated with
the sunshine and the leafy arch of green overhead, with something of
the romance and mystery of untraveled roads in the long vista ahead,
while the winter trip down to the superannuated clergyman’s is cold and
bleak and desolate, perhaps because it had no more interesting result
than the few minutes I begrudged in that stiff little “parlor,” where
the preacher received me with the not unkindly regard of eyes that
had the dazed expression of the very old. I can expiate the perfectly
patent and impolite reluctance with which I visited the aged man,
and the thoughtless contempt youth has for age itself, only by the
hope that those dim eyes have since brightened at the realization of
those glories they had so long foreseen, which formed perhaps the only
consolation of a life that must have had little to gladden it on that
forbidding spot.

All these lines, and others like them in the sprawling young town,
belonged each to different men, and once I happened to hear that the
man who owned the line first mentioned say that every new family that
moved into that thoroughfare or built a house there, meant $73.00 a
year to him. A good many families moved out into that street, enough
indeed to make a settlement that was a town in itself, growing and
spreading at the end of the line. Gradually the gaunt vacancies
between were built up, though not, it appears, until the man had grown
discouraged and sold out, and so suffered the universal fate of the
pioneer. One by one the other lines in town were sold, and finally
a day came when all the lines were owned by a certain few men, who
under our purely individualistic legal system, formed a company and
thus could jointly rejoice in all the individual rights and privileges
of a person, without any of his embarrassing moral duties and
responsibilities.

I ceased to hear of the individual owner any more; I never saw him in
his shirt-sleeves in his little office at the end of the line counting
up the nickels of those new families which each meant $73.00 per
annum to him, and it must have been about the same time that I began
to hear of the traction company. There had been probably intervening
experiments with tough mules, whom no one pitied, as everyone had
pitied the horses they replaced, and there were, in other cities,
astounding miracles of cable cars and elevated railways. And then
electricity came as a motive power, and the streets were made hideous
by the gaunt poles and makeshifts of wires, and the trolley cars came,
and increased in size and numbers, and families swarmed, until out
on those streets and avenues the great yellow cars went rushing and
clanging by, with multitudes of people clinging to the straps and,
toward evening, swarming like flies on the broad rear platforms, and
the conductors in their blue uniforms shouting “Step lively!” with a
voice as authoritative as that which the company spoke in the city
councils. And the families continued to arrive, and to build houses,
and to toil and to contribute each its $73.00 a year, though they did
it with human reluctance and complaint, and grew dimly conscious that
somewhere in the whole complicated transaction an injustice lurked.
And finally this hidden injustice became the chief public concern of
the people of the town, and an issue in local politics for more than a
decade.




LVII


It had been an issue, as I have more than once said in Jones’s time and
in his campaigns, though the issues his tremendous personality raised
were so vast and so general and so fundamental that they included all
issues, as Emerson said his reform included all reforms. It ran like a
scarlet thread through the warp and woof of our communal life; it was
somehow associated with the ambitions of the meanest politician, it
affected the fortunes of every man in business, and it was the means
whereby the community came to have an ideal. The long story of it, like
the story of the same interest in any town, would include triumphs
and tragedies--and the way of politics through the town was strewn
with the pitiable wrecks of character and of life itself that had been
ruthlessly sacrificed to the insatiable greed of privilege. Only the
other day one such wreck, once in a position of honor and trust in the
municipality, was waiting in the outer office; he wanted half a dollar
and a place to sleep. And another like him, most desperate of all,
asked to be committed to a city hospital or even to the asylum for the
insane; he had no other refuge, and as for the poorhouse, he said, not
yet, not yet! And these were the sacrifices privilege demanded of its
parasites; though their case morally, at least, could be no worse than
that of privilege’s principal beneficiaries; not half so bad indeed,
since they had lost the power of appreciation of spiritual values.

I knew a reporter, an Irish lad, whom one of the attorneys of privilege
sought to “befriend.”

“You work pretty hard, don’t you?” asked the attorney.

“Yes,” said the Irish lad.

“And your salary is small?”

“Yes.”

“And a mortgage on your mother’s home?” The agents of privilege always
know a man’s necessities!

“Yes.”

“Well, now, I can tell you how things can be eased up a bit for you.
For instance----”

After the proposal had been artfully made, the Irish lad thought a
moment, and then he raised those blue eyes to the old lawyer.

“Your wife is prominent socially, isn’t she?”

“Why, yes.”

“President of--this and that, eh?”

“Yes.”

“And your daughters just home from a finishing school in Europe, aren’t
they?”

“Yes--but what----?”

“I was wondering,” said the Irish lad, rising, “how you dared go home
at night and look ’em in the face.”

Not all men though have the character, the moral resistance of that
Irish lad, and the scores of the weak and erring ones are the tragic
figures in the long drama of the traction company in the city, in any
city--the drama that cannot be written.




LVIII


Meanwhile, the education of the general mind went on, and we were,
after all, tending somewhither. Our experience in the greatest of our
tasks demonstrated that, and in the change that gradually took place in
sentiment concerning the street railway problem, there was an evidence
of the development of a mass consciousness, a mass will, which some
time in these cities of ours will justify democracy. It is of course
the most difficult process in the world, for a mass of two hundred
thousand people to unite in the expression of a will concerning a
single abstract proposition. The mass to be sure can now and then as it
were rear its head and blaze forth wrath and accomplish some instant
work of destruction; even if it be nothing more than the destruction
of an individual reputation. That is why the recall is so popular and
so generously and frequently employed in those cities that have it.
In such elections, with their personal and human center of interest,
the people all turn out, while in a referendum involving some abstract
principle, the vote cast is always small. That is why the referendum is
so important, and the recall, relatively, so unimportant; the use of
the first in the long run will afford a fine schooling for the people.

The most familiar expression of this rage of course was the clamor
for the indictment and imprisonment of someone connected in sinister
ways with the company, a demand with which I never had the slightest
sympathy, to which I could never yield the slightest acquiescence. What
good, though all the poor and miserable servitors of privilege were put
in prison, while privilege itself remained? Such clamors have had their
results; a few more broken lives, a little more sorrow and shame in the
world, and the clamor ceases, and things go on the same as before.

It is this instability, this variableness, this weariness of the
public mind, on which privilege depends, with a cynical trust so often
justified that it might breed cynicism in all observant and reflective
natures. The street railway proprietors in Toledo expected each
election to demonstrate this weariness in the people, and to restore
them to, or at least confirm them in, the privileges they had enjoyed
under the old régime.

For a people to assume and for a decade consistently to maintain an
attitude toward a public question therefore was a triumph of the
democratic principle. That is what the people of Cleveland did; that is
what the people of Detroit did; that is what the people of Toledo did.
The successive stages of this process were most interesting to observe,
the more especially since they caught in the movement even some of the
street railway group and its political confreres themselves.

In its origin the public will was destructive no doubt, that was the
inarticulate disgust born of the long endurance of inadequate service,
all the miseries of that contemptuous exploitation of the people so
familiar in all the cities of America. To this, on the customary
revelations of a corrupt domination of the political machinery of the
city by the street railway company, there was added a moral rage--the
one element needed to provide the spark for the mine. At first this
rage against the company was such that any action taken by officials
was popular so long as it injured or harassed or was somehow inimical
to the company. And in consequence there was developed a kind of local
jingoism or chauvinism; whenever popularity slackened or it was felt
necessary to remind the electorate back in the ward of the sleepless
vigilance of their representative in the council, a councilman had
only to introduce some resolution that would be against the company’s
interest. It was unfortunate, and had its evil phase, as any suggestion
of intellectual dishonesty must ever have, and it made serious dealing
with the subject extremely difficult and hazardous. It was difficult to
recognize any of the company’s rights; and it was always at the risk
of misunderstanding, and with the certainty of misrepresentation that
this was done. But of course it was necessary to do this, in the course
of the long and complicated transaction, that constant and inflexible
opposition of the public with the private interest which now assumed
the aspect of a noisy and furious war, and now the softer phases of
diplomatic negotiations. Of course there were always those in town
who knew exactly what was to be done; they could settle the vexatious
problem with a facile gesture, between the whiffs of a cigarette on the
back platform of a street car, or in an after dinner speech between
the puffs of a cigar. The one was apt to advise that the “traction
company be brought to time at once,” the other that an “equitable”
settlement be “arranged” by conservative business men. Meanwhile the
problem obviously consisted in the necessity of recognizing the private
right in the proprietors and of securing the public right to the
people, and to do this it was necessary to search out, and isolate,
like some malignant organism, the injustice that somewhere lurked in
this complex and irritating association.

In my first campaign we proposed to grant no renewal of franchises at
a rate of fare higher than three cents. Jones had advised it, and I
had been committed to it long before. It was Tom Johnson’s old slogan,
and it was popular. I used to explain to the crowds my own conviction
that the problem never would be settled until we had municipal
ownership, but there was in Toledo in those days very little sentiment
for municipal ownership, and my conviction met with no applause, and
was received only with mild toleration. In the second campaign, there
was more indorsement; in the third there was a certain enthusiasm for
the principle, in the fourth it seemed to be almost unanimous, and
now the principle has become one of the cardinal articles of faith. I
do not wish it to appear that I had converted all these people to my
view; I had not tried to do that, and doubtless could not have done so
had I tried, but the conviction came by the very necessities of the
situation.




LIX


Those men who ventured early into the street-car business were
pioneers; they assumed large risks, and they rendered a public service.
They had the courage to undertake experiments; they had faith that the
town would grow and become in time a city. And they staked all on the
chance. They had little difficulty, if they had any at all, in securing
franchises from the city to use the streets, for the people of the city
were glad to have the convenience of transportation. Indeed many of
the lines were community enterprises, organized by the men of a given
neighborhood for the sake of the transportation merely, and not with
any notion of personal profit.

Franchise ordinances then were loosely drawn; men had no conception of
what changes the future was to bring about, they lacked the imagination
to prefigure it, the faith to believe it, and so the street-car
promoters who came along a little later were the heirs of advantages
which otherwise they would not have obtained. Under these advantages,
these privileges, they or their immediate grantees were enabled to take
over for their own use and profit the enormous social values that were
being created in cities, not by them, but by all those families who
moved in, and toiled, and wrought and built the modern city.

This was the first phase of the street-car business, its experimental
stage, commensurate with the rapid, disordered growth of the city in
the middle and western states of America. Few indeed of the pioneers
in the business became wealthy; many no doubt lost their money, though
they tried in vain to vary or improve their fortunes through the
changes that were rapidly developing the mighty problem of transporting
the crowded populations of our cities. There were, for instance, the
days when mules were substituted for horses, and sacrificed rapidly and
ruthlessly on the principle that it was cheaper to replace them than
to care for them, a system about as bad in its consuming cruelty as
that adopted by some factories with reference to their human employees.
Then, in a few of the larger cities, there were the cable cars, but the
second phase came with the adoption of electricity as a motive power,
and the coincident development, almost a miracle, of the towns of
middle and western America into real cities.

With electricity as a motive power, and the consequent cheapening of
operation, the street-car business entered upon its second phase, and
it ushered in at once the era of speculation in franchises and social
values, watered stocks and bonds. The era of exploitation came upon us,
and out of these privileges, out of other privileges to conduct other
public utilities, i. e., privileges to absorb social values, enormous
fortunes were made, with all the evils that come with a vulgar,
newly-rich plutocracy. To keep, and extend, and renew these privileges,
they must have their lawyers, and their newspapers to mislead and
debauch the public mind; they must go into politics, organize and
control the machines of both parties, bribe councilmen and legislators
and jurors, and even have judges on the bench subservient to their
will, so that the laws of the state and the grants of the municipality
might be construed in their favor. The sordid, tragic tale of their
domination of municipal politics is now universally known, and in
the tale may be read the causes of most of our municipal misrule. It
happened in Toledo as it happened everywhere, such is the inexorability
of the general law, and the popular reaction was the same.

And so we came upon a new, the third stage, since I have set out to be
scientific in analysis of tractions, and the very name by which these
big enterprises have latterly been called, that is, public service
corporations, suggests the meaning and indicates the significance of
that era. Two facts, or principles, had become perfectly apparent;
first, that transportation, the primal necessity of a modern city, is
a natural monopoly, and must be treated as such. Second, that if these
public utility corporations are to continue to hold these monopolies,
they must become public service corporations indeed, that is, they must
serve the public. No more, then, the old corporation contempt of the
people, at least outwardly expressed, but a softer voice in addressing
them, and a new respect, perhaps grown sincere. Their old lobbyists
disappeared from the council chamber and the city hall--for eight years
they were not seen there. The companies had been primarily profit
making institutions and only incidentally for public service, they were
operated for the private benefit of their owners in contempt of public
right; the service was secondary.

We may say that this third era is the era of regulation, or, as it
is more apt to be, attempted regulation, by the city, in which the
principle of the public interest as paramount to the private interest
is to be the basis on which a private company shall be permitted to
operate. This era will endure long enough to demonstrate itself a
failure, the general mind will continue to learn, to inform itself,
democracy will develop new functions, and we shall enter on the fourth,
and perhaps the final stage, that of municipal ownership.




LX


We came upon the scene just when the discussion was emerging from the
second into the third of those phases into which I have divided the
development of the problem. The franchises granted almost a generation
before were about to expire, and new arrangements between the city
and the traction company, the Big Con, as the newspaper argot would
have it. Chicago had already, or almost, gone through her settlement;
and though the settlement was pretty bad, it nevertheless recognized
the principle that the value of a street railway franchise is a
public, social, or communal value, produced by the community, and
therefore belonged to the community. In Toledo the company had but
about $5,000,000 of actual investment, while it had a capitalization
in stocks and bonds of nearly $30,000,000, and the difference of
$25,000,000 was the community value which the magnates had been
exploiting for their own benefit. We simply proposed that this value
should be returned to the people. We proposed, then, that the rate
of fare to be charged by the company should be large enough and only
large enough to pay a reasonable return on the actual investment and
to provide good service, a service that was to be dictated, regulated
and controlled by the city. This principle had been established, or
at least admitted in the Chicago settlement, and the same thing had
been done, though on a sounder and more scientific basis in Cleveland,
where Tom Johnson’s long and gallant and intelligent contest already
in effect had been won. Over in Detroit the same principles had been
deduced, though the discussion there was so prolonged, as proved
ultimately to be the case in Toledo, that the people demanded municipal
ownership, without passing through the intervening experimental stage
of regulation and control.

There is of course nothing sacrosanct in three-cent fares. The movement
of the people, which at the same time, in the old Russian phrase of
Kropotkin, was a movement toward the people, had become an agitation
for this rate. It had been begun years before by Mayor Pingree in
Detroit, and was taken up in Cleveland by Tom Johnson, whose whole
career in a romantic manner, at once embodied and illustrated the
history of the street railway problem in the American city. The
adoption of the phrase as a shibboleth or slogan of the progressive
forces was simply and easily explained, for in the mind of Johnson and
in the minds of those who were like him or were influenced by him, the
difference between the prevailing fare of five cents and the proposed
fare of three cents somehow measured the franchise value, or that
social value which belonged to the people. Tom Johnson, indeed, used
often to say that he favored a three-cent fare simply because it was
two cents nearer nothing, thereby revealing a glimpse of his dream of
a social order in which the municipality would provide transportation
just as it provides sidewalks, sewers, bridges, etc., all of which are
paid for at the treasury in taxes. It was believed and held by all of
us, that this franchise value should be reclaimed or retained by the
people in this direct and simple manner of lowering the fare.

There was never any notion, of course, of interfering in any way with
the existing rights of the company; it was to have all that to which it
was entitled under its old franchises or contracts. But it was proposed
that when we came to draw a new contract, the political relations
of the city and the company were to be considered as of paramount
importance, using the word “political,” of course in its old authentic
sense, and not as expressing in any wise the sinister thing it has come
to connote in the popular mind. We were determined to meet not only the
conditions of the present, but to do what our forerunners in office
had never done, that is, to protect the interests of the people of the
future. I suppose this sounds very much like the trite generalities
of the politician, but we sincerely tried to express the theory with
definiteness and particularity. We sought not only a reduction of
the fare and a regulation of the service in the public interest, but
we wished to provide for that future day when, as a result of the
certain growth of the city, the sure improvement in transportation
facilities, and the inevitable development of the democratic function,
the municipality is to undertake these enterprises as a proper public
function.

It was these principles we tried to bear in mind in those long
negotiations which we held all during the months of one spring and
summer over that big table in the council chamber. We were nervous when
we entered upon this work, nervous as are those who enter the finals
in some tournament of sport; we did not know much about the subject,
and we were confronted by the street railway magnates and their clever
lawyers. But we could learn as we went along, and we always had to our
assistance Newton Baker over in Cleveland, and Peter Witt, and Carl
Nau, whom we had employed as the city’s accountant when the time came
at last when we could examine the company’s books; they had all gone
through the long civil war in Cleveland, as had Professor Edward W.
Bemis, whom we afterwards engaged in his quality of expert adviser on
valuations.

Perhaps at first we laid too great stress on three-cent fares, though
I do not know how we could have done otherwise. Dr. Delos F. Wilcox,
who has written an excellent work on the whole subject, had advised us
indeed that a disproportionate amount of energy and effort had already
been expended--not by us, only, but by all those in other cities who
were in similar struggles--in the direction of low fares. He pointed
out, I remember, that five cents in that day was worth little more
than three cents or three and a half cents had been a decade before,
according to the scale of prices then current; he thought that in
terms of general prices the public had already secured three-cent
fares without knowing it. It was a question of some subtlety and
some intricacy, to be left to economists; we could not feel that our
battle had been won so easily, and we did not undertake to console
the people with the recondite theory. We had before us, in vision,
and sometimes in their corporeal reality, the weary and exasperated
strap-hangers, and the human sardines on the rear platform with their
valid complaints; they all wanted low fares, good service, and seats.
An old street-car man once said that to provide seats for everybody is
an impossibility, and to prove this assertion he humorously classified
humanity into three groups: “workers, clerkers and shirkers.” Each
morning, he said, the workers go down at seven, the clerkers at eight,
and the shirkers at nine, and that therefore it is easy to provide them
all with seats in the morning hours; but that as all three classes
wish to go home at the same hour in the evening, it is then physically
impossible to provide them all with seats.

But whether or not too great stress was three-cent fares we learned
during those months of wearisome and futile negotiations, that the
theory was not scientific. The people were entitled to their money’s
worth in service, the company to adequate pay for the service it
rendered, and as the basis of the whole transaction was a public
necessity, the city had the right to control the service, to dictate
what it should be. The old theory was that the people existed for
the street-car company; the new principle was quite the reverse; the
street-car company was but a temporary instrument of social service,
and the social right was paramount to all others.

The company therefore was entitled to a fare sufficient to enable
it to provide the service thus demanded, and to do this it must
charge enough to pay its operating expenses, taxes, and interest,
enough to meet the cost of improvements and depreciation, and to
pay a reasonable return on its investment. It was not entitled to
any speculative return. There was no longer on the company’s part
that risk its predecessors in interest, the pioneers or promoters or
whatever they were, had been compelled to take; its investment was no
longer precarious; nothing, indeed, could be more certain than the
stability of street railway investments. Their securities, based upon
a public necessity, supported by the diurnal comings and goings of all
those thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, had become in a
certain very real sense, a fixed burden upon the people of the city,
a burden as fixed and inevitable as taxes. In the hands of private
owners such securities, under a franchise ordinance properly drawn,
partake largely of the character of municipal bonds, which indeed
they resemble in fundamentals and ends. The issue of securities was
therefore to be as jealously guarded as an issue of municipal bonds,
and overcapitalization, the prolific source of so much evil, was to be
prevented. The enterprise had become as stable as any human institution
can be, and with the limited risk there was to be applied the
familiar principle of limited profit. The principle was recognized in
Cleveland, where the return fixed as reasonable was 6 per cent., which
is but little more than municipal bonds pay. And when this principle
is established, municipal ownership almost automatically follows;
investors used to large speculative profits, are ready to sell out to
the municipality; thus, by indirection, democracy comes into her own.

It was easy enough to fix most of the elements of this return; the
accountants could do that, in their intricate discussions of car-miles
and curves and straight lines of depreciation and points of saturation
in traffic, and all that, but the tremendous difficulty was to
determine just what the investment was and what was a reasonable return
on that investment.

It is this pass to which all such negotiations, conducted in sincerity,
come at last; it is this on which the whole question hinges, it is
this that might as well be done first as last, namely, to evaluate
the property of the company. It is necessary not only to get at the
investment and the return thereon, but to ascertain what the city must
pay when it comes to take over the street railway system.

But we did not do it at first, and we did not do it at last. At first
it was impossible to get it into the councilmanic head that it was at
all necessary, especially since it cost money to retain the “experts,”
as they are called, to do the work. They were prone to that old vice
of the human mind which leads it to imagine that when it has stated
the end to be achieved it has at the same time stated the means of
achieving it,--like the advice to the bashful man “to assume an easy
and graceful attitude, especially in the presence of ladies”--and
when council was finally convinced and had provided the funds for the
experts, we could not agree as to who should be employed. That is, the
human equation was apparent. There was unhappily nobody but men to make
evaluations, and all the engineers who were competent were employed
by street railway companies, and expected or hoped to continue to be
employed by street railway companies, and they had evolved so many
fantastic notions of “intangible” value that they could account for
almost any excess in artificial capitalization, and make the grossest
exhibition of corporate greed in watering stocks appear like veritable
self denial in frugality and economy. We selected Professor Bemis to
represent the city, because he was one of the few of the “experts”
committed to the people’s cause; he had advised Tom Johnson throughout
his long war. But the company never could be brought to select anybody,
or to agree upon the third arbiter--even to accept the Judge of the
United States Circuit Court when, against the advice of the whole
administrative circle, I proposed him.

Again and again in our prolonged negotiations we returned, as in a
vicious circle, to this point; again and again we reached this impasse.




LXI


Meanwhile, the franchises were expiring, and the time drew on when
the company would have no rights left in the streets. And here was
the opportunity for the mind that had the power, or the defect, of
isolating propositions, of regarding them as absolute, of ignoring
the intricate relativity of life. “Put the company off the streets,”
was the cry; “make it stop running its cars; bring it to its knees.”
However, we could not bring the company to its knees without bringing
the riders to their feet; we could not put the company off the streets,
without at the same time and by the same process, putting the people on
the streets; when the cars stopped running the people began walking.
The public convenience was paramount.

Then Mr. Cornell Schreiber, the City Solicitor, hit upon a plan. He
drew an ordinance providing that the company could use the streets
wherein its rights had expired, only on the condition that it carry
passengers at a three-cent fare, and the ordinance was at once passed
by the council. It was of doubtful legality, but it had its effect in
a world of human beings. Before it was effective even, people were
tendering three cents as fare; and in the face of the difficulty of
dealing with a whole populace in this mood, the company agreed to put
in force a temporary rate of three cents during the rush hours of the
morning and evening, and it lowered fares in the other hours and made
further concessions. And there we let the matter rest.

And, since the education of the general mind never stops, the people
were learning. Their patience was time and again exhausted by the
unavoidable length of the franchise dispute, for the problem was
to them, as to most Americans, new, the legal questions in which
the whole subject was prolific had not been settled, there was the
interruption of business and convenience and pleasure attending long
continued negotiations, and perhaps more than all that irritation
of the public temper which proceeds from all communal disputes. The
company’s representatives counted on all this to tire the people out;
and since the controversy assumed a political complexion, and there was
as always the difficulty of sustaining the mass will, they had hopes
that by delay the people in weariness would surrender. The time came
when the sentiment in favor of municipal ownership was so strong that
the Independents adopted the view I had expressed and declared it to be
their purpose to grant no renewals of franchises at all, but to let the
company operate on sufferance until the city itself could take over the
lines.

During the course of the long struggle a change had come over the
spirit of the people, and this change had been reflected in the laws.
The greatest difficulty had been found in the city’s want of autonomy;
the cities of Ohio not only lacked the power to own and operate public
utilities, but they even had few rights in contracting with the private
companies. The street-car companies had always been more ably and
assiduously represented in the state legislature than had the people
themselves; the people had not had the strength to wrest these powers
from the legislature, and indeed, in their patience and toryism, they
had not made many efforts to do so. Thus our campaign led us out into
the state, and the end, toward which we had to struggle, was the free
city; the last of our demands was home rule. In the relations between
public utility corporations and the municipality, our cities were a
whole generation behind the cities of Great Britain, Germany, France
and Belgium. Indeed, in relation to all social functions we were not
much further advanced than was Rome in the second century.

As to the medieval cities of Italy, the free cities of Germany and the
cities of Great Britain, struggling all of them against some overlord,
some king, noble or bishop, so at last there came to our cities a
realization of the vassalage they were under. Their destinies were in
the hands of the country politicians in the state legislature who had
no sympathy with city problems, because they had no understanding of
them. Oftenest indeed they had a contempt for them, they all held to
the Puritan ideal. But a demand for freedom went up from Cleveland,
from Cincinnati, from Columbus, from Toledo. The legislature began
to make its reluctant concessions; it gave cities, for instance, the
right to have street railway franchises referred to the people for
approval or rejection. And at last in the great awakening, the state
constitution was ultimately amended and cities were given home rule. It
was the irony of life that Golden Rule Jones and Tom Johnson could not
have lived to see that day!




LXII


A few weeks after my election to a fourth term I wrote out and gave
to the reporters a statement in which I said that I would not be
again a candidate for the office of mayor. I had been thinking of my
old ambition in letters, and of those novels I had planned to write.
Already I had been six years in office and I had not written a novel
in all that time. And here I was, just entering upon another term. If
ever I were to write those novels I would better be about it, before
I grew too old and too tired. The politicians, regarding all such
statements as but the professional insincerities of their trade, could
not consider my decision seriously of course, or credit its intention.
They were somewhat like my friends in the literary world, or like
some of them at least, who were unable to understand why I should not
continue indefinitely to run for mayor, though the politicians were not
so innocent and credulous, since they did not believe that I could as
inevitably continue to be elected. I suppose it was the life of action
that appealed to my literary friends or to their literary imaginations;
they had the human habit of disparaging their own calling, and, if they
did not hold my performance in that field as lightly as the politicians
held it, they wondered why I did not prefer politics. The politicians
in their harangues spoke of my writings bitterly, as though they were
a personal affront to their intelligences, and urged the electorate to
rebuke me for spending my time upon such nonsense. If I had not known
that they had never read my books, or any books, all this might have
been chilling to the literary aspiration, but I knew them to their
heart’s core, where there was nothing but contempt for books, and, as I
sometimes thought, yielding too much to cynicism and despair, nothing
but contempt for any sort of beauty or goodly impulse. Of course, they
were not so bad as that; out of politics they were as good as anyone or
as anything; we instinctively recognize the vitiating quality of the
political atmosphere in our constant use of the phrase “if it could
only be taken out of politics,” as with the tariff, the currency,
municipal government, etc. But my friends in the political line could
join my friends in the literary line in the surprise they felt at my
decision to retire at the end of that last term. The politicians did
not think I meant what I said, of course; it is quite impossible for a
politician to imagine a man’s meaning what he says, since politicians
so seldom mean what they say themselves; they considered it merely
as bad politics to have said such a thing at all. “It’ll embarrass
you when you run again,” they would warn me in their bland _naïveté_.
It did not embarrass me, however, because I would not and did not
run again, though I had to decline a nomination or two before they
were convinced, but their own lack of faith, those who were still
Independents, at least, proved an ultimate embarrassment to them, for
they neglected to agree upon a candidate to succeed me, and by the next
election they had grouped themselves in factions, each with its own
candidate. Perhaps this untoward result came to pass as much because
the independent movement by that time had become the Independent party,
as for any other reason discernible to the mind of man; at least, it
was disparaged by the use of that term, which implied its own reproach
in Toledo, and its sponsors conducted themselves so much after the
historic precedents of faction in political parties, by separating into
the inevitable right and left wing, that they managed to get themselves
soundly beaten.

Eight years is a long time to serve in any office. My grandfather
had given four years to the Civil War, and I had found the mayor’s
office as trying, as difficult, and as alien as he had found his
martial experience. The truth is, that long before the eight years
were over the irritation of constant, persistent, nagging criticism
had got on my nerves, and, besides the pain of misunderstanding and
misrepresentation, I grew to have a perfect detestation for those
manipulations which are the technic of politics. And, then, one cannot
be a mayor always, and it were better to retire than to be dismissed.

“But I thought you didn’t mind criticism?” a man said to me one day. “I
always supposed that after a while one became callous.”

My dear friend Bishop Williams of Detroit was at the table, and I shall
ever be grateful to him for the smile of instant comprehension and
sympathy with which he illuminated the reply he made before I had time
to speak.

“Yes, callous,” he remarked, “or--raw.”

It was precisely that. There were those who were always saying to me:
“I know you don’t mind what they say about you, but I never could stand
it; I’m too sensitive.” It was a daily experience, almost as difficult
to endure as the visits of those who came to report the latest
ill-natured comment; they did it because they were friends and felt
that I should know it. But Bishop Williams knows life and understands
human nature more completely and more tolerantly than any clergyman I
ever knew.

And then politics have the dreadful effect of beating all the freshness
out of a man; if they do not make him timid, they make him hesitant
and cautious, provident of his opinion; he goes about with his finger
on his lips, fearful of utterance, and, when he does speak, it is
in guarded syllables which conceal his true thought; he cultivates
solemnity and the meretricious art of posing; humor is to be avoided,
since the crowd is perplexed by humor and so resents it, and will have
only the stale rudimentary wit of those stories which men, straining to
be funny, match at the banquet board. And when he indulges himself in
public speech it is to pour forth a tide of words,

          Full of sound and fury,
  Signifying nothing.

I used to be haunted continually by a horrid fear that I should lose
the possibility of ever winning the power of utterance, since no such
prudence is at all compatible with the practice of any art. For art
must, first of all, be utter sincerity, the artist’s business is to
think out his thoughts about life to the very end, and to speak them
as plainly as the power and the ability to speak them have been given
to him; he must not be afraid to offend; indeed, if he succeed at all,
he must certainly offend in the beginning. I am quite aware that I may
seem inconsistent in this notion, since I have intimated my belief
that Jones was an artist; and so he was, in a way, and, if I do not
fly to the refuge of trite sayings and allege him as the exception
that proves the rule, I am sure that I may say, and, if I have in the
least been able to convey any distinct conception of his personality,
the reader will agree with me when I say, that he was _sui generis_.
And besides it was not as a politician that he won his success. Had
he ventured outside the political jurisdiction of his own city the
politicians instantly would have torn him asunder because he had not
been “regular.” And, that, I find, when I set it down, is precisely
what I am trying to say about the artist; he must not be regular.
Every great artist in the world has been irregular, as irregular as
Corot, going forth in the early morning in search of the elusive and
ineffable light of dawn as it spread over the earth and stole through
the greenwoods at Barbizon, or as Manet, or Monet, or any other man who
never knew appreciation in his lifetime. And Jones and all like him are
brothers of those incomparable artists; they are not kin in any way to
the world’s politicians.

And then so many of the old guard were dead. A strange and tragic fate
had pursued us, overtaking, one after another, our very best--Jones,
first of all, and then Oren Dunham, E. B. Southard, Dad McCullough,
Franklin Macomber, Lyman Wachenheimer, Dr. Donnelly, William H. Maher.
These brave, true souls were literally burned out in the fires of that
fierce and relentless conflict, and then there came that soft autumn
night when seven of our young men in a launch were run down by a
freighter on Maumee Bay and drowned, every one of them.

I shall never forget Johnson Thurston as he sat in my office during
that last campaign, recalling these men who had been to him as comrades
in arms, and, what affected him more sorely, the fact that in our
overabundant political success the ideals that had beckoned them on had
become blurred in the vision of those who came after them. I detected
him in the act of drawing his handkerchief furtively from his pocket,
and hastily pressing it to his eyes, as he stammered something in
apology for his emotion....

Thus there came the irresistible conviction that the work of the
politician was not for me. There was other work I wished to do. I
doubt whether the politician’s work is ever permanent, though it is
too much to say that it lacks real value; I have never been able to
think it out. The work of few men, of course, is permanent, sometimes
the work of the artist least of any. But, however ephemeral, if the
artist’s work is done in sincerity, it is of far greater worth than the
work of the politician, if for no other reason, than because, to recall
again those words of George Moore which can never lose their charm or
their consolation, the traffic of the politician is with the affairs of
this world, while the artist is concerned with the dreams, the visions,
and the aspirations of a world that is beyond this. I have quoted them
before in these pages, I know; they cannot be quoted too often, or too
often read by us Americans, if, by pondering them, we may plumb their
profound depths. For we all read human history too superficially. Kings
and emperors, princes and dukes, prime ministers and generals may
fascinate the imagination for a while, but if life is ever to unfold
its possibilities to the later consciousness, these become but the
phantoms of vanished realms, and there emerge more gracious figures,
Phidias and Theocritus; Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; Raphael,
Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Correggio; Donatello and Michelangelo;
Sidney, Spenser, Tyndale, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. These and the
other artists and humanists of their times are veritable personalities
in our world, far more than Elizabeth, or the dukes of the Medici,
or even Pericles. For from periods such as these their names made
illustrious, from the Revival of Learning, the Renaissance, the
Reformation, man emerged as Man, clothed with the beauty and power of
an emancipated spirit. In the freedom of the mind, the spontaneous
outburst of ecstasy and delight, the new-born possibility of loveliness
and harmony and joyous existence, they not only exalted life with
art, but gained the courage to undertake sterner examinations of its
mystery. And this same perennial spirit of humanism built, not only the
proud and voluptuous cities of Tuscany and Lombardy, but the wealthy
free cities of Flanders and Germany--and it discovered America, not the
America of the senses alone, but the larger, nobler America of the mind.

And, surely, this America is not always to bear the reproach of having
no music, and so little painting and literature of her own. Surely
the aspirations of this new land, with the irresistible impulse of
the democratic spirit and humanistic culture are to find emotional
expression in the terms and forms of enduring beauty. It was this
sublime adventure that interested me far more than the trivial and
repulsive wrangles of the politicians....

Our opponents had never known how wholly right they were in their
reiterated charge that I was but a dreamer; incorrigible dreamer
indeed, and nothing more!

But in these years I had given my city the best there was in me,
little as that was, and when the legislature made provision for the
constitutional convention, which met at Columbus, and, after months of
deliberation, submitted a long list of amendments to the fundamental
law of the state, among them that one which granted home rule to
cities, I felt, for it was an emotion deeper than thought, that if
the people could only be induced to approve that amendment the long
anticipated and happy release was at hand. We had been engaged on an
impossible task; we had been trying to regenerate the city by means
of electing to office persons who in themselves would reflect the
communal aspiration, but this could not be continued indefinitely; the
cities could achieve no genuine reform until they were autonomous.
With home rule democracy would have the means of development, and the
people the opportunity of self-expression; they would have to depend on
themselves; they could no longer, with an Oriental fatalism, neglect
their own destiny and then lay the blame for the inevitable catastrophe
on the mayor, or the political boss, or the country members of the
legislature.

There were, if I remember well, about fifty of these amendments, among
them provisions for the initiative and referendum, woman suffrage,
and many other progressive and radical doctrines, in addition to our
beloved home rule for cities, and, when the campaign opened in behalf
of their adoption, Newton Baker, who a year before had been elected
mayor of Cleveland, proposed that he and I make a tour of the state in
a motor car and speak for the home rule amendment, since all the others
had their devoted proponents.

Nothing more delightful than a campaign tour in company with Newton
Baker could be imagined, and I had visions of our little caravan,
out on the country roads of Ohio, going from town to town, and of
our standing up in the car and speaking to the crowds of farmers who
had come into the town to hear us, or having come for their Saturday
marketing, would pause while we told them of the needs of cities. I had
always believed that if the farmers could only be brought to understand
the cities they would not be so obdurate with us, but would enlarge our
opportunities of self-expression and self-government. I could fancy
myself standing up and leaning over the side of the car and talking to
them, while they stood there in their drab garments, their faces drawn
in mental concentration, looking at us out of eyes around which were
little wrinkles of suspicion, wondering what designs we had upon them;
at first they would stand afar off, perhaps on the other side of the
street, as they used to do when we went out to speak to them in the
judicial campaigns; but then presently they would draw a little closer,
until at last they crowded about the car, staying on to the end, and
then perhaps even vouchsafing us the conservative approval of scattered
applause. Or I would dramatize Baker as speaking, while I sat there
utterly charmed with his manner, his clear and polished expression,
and envied him his ability to speak with such surprising fluency,
such ease and grace, as if the fact of putting words together so that
they would form clear, logical and related sentences were nothing
at all, and wondering why it was that everyone that heard was not
instantly converted to his plan, whatever it was.... And then, between
times, Baker would not be talking politics at all; he would not be
indulging in politician’s low gossip, slandering every one he knew--the
ineradicable and, I suppose, inevitable habit of politicians, because
in public they are obliged to be so suave in utterance and so smiling
and ingratiating in manner. Baker was not like them at all; he knew a
vast deal of literature and could talk about books with comprehension;
if you mentioned a passage from John Eglinton, or a scene from
Tourgenieff, or a poem of Yeats or Masefield, he would know what you
were talking about; he is not one of those who, by the little deceit of
a thin, factitious smile of appreciation, pretend an acquaintance they
have never enjoyed. Baker has been able to keep the habit of reading,
even in politics, a singular achievement. Only he would not read novels
that were in the somber or tragic manner; I used to tell him that this
was a sign he was growing old, since only the buoyancy of youth can
risk its spirit in such darkened paths. For instance, he would never
read my novel about prisons, “The Turn of the Balance”; he said he knew
it was too terrible. But I did not reproach or blame him. I no longer
like to read terrible books myself, since life is....

But that pretty scheme fell through, our tour was abandoned, and we
went separate ways, though we did have the joy of speaking together on
several occasions, once here in Toledo, where we opened the campaign
in old Memorial Hall, and again in a town down the state, and at last
in two great meetings in Cleveland, where they got out the old tent
Johnson had used in his campaigns, and the audiences its canvas walls
sheltered, there under the flaring torches, were inspired by his
spirit as once they had been by his presence, and with the enthusiasm
of them fresh in my heart I set out from Cleveland that last week of
the campaign for the long drive to Columbus, where the campaign was to
close.

It was a hot day in early September; the clouds were piled high in
the west as we started, and the air was suffocating in its dense
humidity; plainly it was to be a day of thunder and lightning and
tropical showers. My friend, Henry W. Ashley, who understands democracy
to the fundamentals (his father was the friend of Lincoln and wrote
the Fifteenth Amendment), was with us, for he was ever an interested
spectator of our politics. We went by the way of Oberlin because
Ashley wished to see the college campus and indulge some sentimental
reflections in a scene that had been so vitally associated with the old
struggle of the abolitionists. The storm which had been so ominously
threatening all the morning broke upon us as we slowly made our way
through the country south of Oberlin, as desolate a tract as one could
find, and we were charged as heavily with depression as were the clouds
with rain as we thought of the futility of attempting to convince
the inhabitants of such a land that they had any responsibility for
the problems that were vexing the people in the cities of the state.
I remember a village through which we passed; it was about noon,
according to our watches, though, since in the country the people
reject Standard time and regulate their leisurely affairs by “God’s
time,” noon was half an hour gone, and, after their dinners, they were
seeking the relaxation they did not seem to need. The rain had ceased,
and on the village green under the clearing sky the old men had come
out to pitch horseshoes. Among them was a patriarch whose long white
beard, stained with the juice of the tobacco he resolutely chewed,
swept the belt of his slack trousers; he was in bare feet. The human
foot after it has trod this earth for three score years and ten is not
a thing of beauty, and Ashley joked me, as we labored in the mud of
those deplorable roads, for my temerity in hoping that we could convert
that antediluvian to our way of thinking.

Had the task been wholly mine I should not have undertaken it, and, of
course, in that instance I did not attempt it; the old barefoot quoit
player stood to us a symbol of the implicit and stubborn conservatism
of the rural districts. But there were others in the field, an army of
them, indeed; Herbert Bigelow, the radical preacher of Cincinnati, who
had been president of the constitutional convention; Henry T. Hunt,
Cincinnati’s young mayor; and, most influential of all of them perhaps,
James M. Cox, destined that autumn to be elected governor of Ohio.
And, besides all these, there was the spirit of the times, penetrating
at last with its inspiring ideas even the conservatism of the country
people. I was confident that the old man could be counted upon to vote
for the initiative and referendum at any rate, since one so free and
democratic in costume and manner must be of the democratic spirit
as well, though I had my doubts of him in that moment when he should
put on his spectacles and examine the amendments abolishing capital
punishment, and granting home rule to cities.

But the sun came out again as we climbed the hills that overlook
Mansfield, to command a lovely scene, broad fertile valleys all renewed
by the rain and flooded with sunshine, and I remembered that Altgeld
had once lived there, and beheld this same landscape, that he had
taught school in that town and from there had gone away with a regiment
to fight in the Civil War. The chauffeur got out and took the chains
off the tires, while we sat silent under the influences of the beauty
of those little Ohio hills. And then, as we started on, the clouds
returned, the scene darkened, and it began to rain again, and, before
we knew, the car skidded and we were in the ditch. The wife of the
farmer whose garden fence we had broken in our accident revealed all
the old rural dislike of the urbanite; she said she was glad of our
fate, since motorists were forever racing by and killing her chickens,
and with this difficulty I left Ashley to deal, since he had been
president of a railroad and was experienced in adjusting claims, and,
after he had parleyed a while, I saw him take out his pocketbook, and
then the chauffeur got the car out of the ditch and we were on our way
again.

The scenes and the experiences of that journey remain with me in a
distinctness that is keen in my senses still; because I suppose I felt
that in the race with time we were then engaged upon, if we were to
reach Columbus that evening for the meeting which was to close the
campaign, I was in a symbolic manner racing with my own fate; that
campaign a success and I should be free. I should have liked to linger
a while in Delaware, where I had spent a portion of my boyhood when my
father was a pastor there, and where in the University my uncle William
F. Whitlock had been a professor of Latin and literature for half a
century, dean of the faculty, and, for a while, president. As we passed
by the chapel in the shade of the old elms on the campus I felt that I
could still hear the solemn strains of the noble hymn they sang at his
funeral, the lusty young voices of a thousand students, united with
the quivering trebles of some old clergymen, in “Faith of Our Fathers,
Living Still.”

My eyes could pierce the walls of the chapel, closed and silent that
afternoon for the autumn term had not opened, and I could see myself
sitting there in the pew with our family, and looking at the portrait
in oil of my uncle on the wall, among the portraits of the other
presidents of the University, faintly adumbrating on his great smoothly
shaven face the smile of quizzical humor which he wears in my memory. I
sat there,

  by these tears a little boy again,

and thought of those days so long before when at evening he would
come to our house and stand spreading his hands before the fire for a
while; he generally brought under his arm a book for my father to read.
I remembered that he used to carry papers in his high hat, and that
his coat stood away from his neck, round which he wore a low standing
collar, with a black cravat. He seemed to carry in the pocket of his
waistcoat an endless succession of eyeglasses; he would use a pair,
take them down from his high nose, lay them on the table, forget them,
and, when he wished to read again, draw another pair from his waistcoat
pocket. And I went on thinking of him as he looked over his glasses on
that evening when I had gone late into his study and found him bent
over his desk with the “Satires” of Juvenal before him, studying his
lesson for the morrow, he said. I thought he knew all the Latin there
was left in this world, but, “Oh, no,” he said, and added: “If you
would sometimes study at this hour of the night perhaps----” He did
not finish his sentence, since it finished itself.... “I don’t exactly
know how to render that passage, Professor,” a student, blundering
through an unmastered lesson, said in conciliatory accents one morning.
“Ah, that has been evident for some time,” my uncle replied.... And
now there he lay in his coffin, on the spot in that dim chapel where
he had so often stood up to address the students; he was gone with all
those others whose portraits hung on the wall, men who had stood to
me in my boyhood as the great figures of the world. I should see him
walking under those trees no more, his tall form stooped in habitual
meditation.... They were all big, those Whitlock forbears of mine,
six feet tall every one of them, grim Puritans, I think, when they
first came to this country three centuries ago.... And I had a vision
of my uncle as walking that afternoon in other groves with all these
dark ministerial figures that towered over my boyhood. They were all
Puritans, too, strong and rugged men, inflexible, obdurate, much
enduring, stern pioneers whose like is known no more. And I, who could
join in the lofty strains of that old hymn, as a memorial to my uncle,
could find unavailing regret in my reverence.... But all changes,
and it was a time of change, one of those periods which make up the
whelming tragedy of this life. And, as they had gone, so all the old
combinations had disappeared with them, resolved into the elements that
make up that shadowy vale we call the past.... But we were driving
on, racing away from that past as fast as we could go, on by the
cemetery where my uncle lies in his grave, on by the rocky ledges of
the Olentangy, the little stream where we boys used to swim, and, just
as darkness was falling, besmattered with mud, we drove into Columbus,
and along High Street, hideous in the crazy decorations that were hung
out in honor of the State Fair, and up to the Neil House--and across
the street on the steps of the old state house four or five thousand
people already gathered for the meeting at which I was to be the only
speaker. A bath and a bite of supper, and then across the street to the
meeting, and I was standing there before that vast crowd, and over us
the shadowy mass of the old capitol, in which my grandfather had made
the first motion that was ever put in it as a member of the senate half
a century before; he told me that his two sons danced all night at the
ball with which its opening was celebrated....

And so, on that brilliant Sunday morning in September, as we entered
the motor car in Columbus, with the impressions of the great meeting
of that Saturday night still fresh and vivid in the mind, I could
settle myself for the long drive back to Toledo over the white pikes
that wound northward between the fair fields of our beautiful Ohio,
and say to myself, over and over, with the delicious sensations of a
secret, that the relief had almost come at last, and that now I could
do the thing I loved to do--if only the people would approve the
constitutional amendments at the election on Tuesday. There were the
happiest of auguries in the sky; it was without a cloud to fleck its
blue expanse, and the sun blazed and its light sparkled in the fresh
air, and as we rode the fields swept by, the pastures still green, the
ripening corn tall in maturity, nodding its heavy tassels and waving
its broad leaves of dark green, the mown fields yellow with their
stubble, and the wide land, somnolent and heavy with fecundity, already
rich with the gold of autumn.

And the people did approve, with vast majorities, and among all the
principles of democracy they wrote in their fundamental law that day
was that of municipal home rule, so that all those cities, undreamed of
when the old constitution had been written, and all those little towns,
silent and sleepy in the drowse of that Sunday afternoon, might own and
operate their public utilities, might draft their own charters, have
what form of government they pleased, in short, become free. And so
the great dream of Johnson and of Jones came true at last.




LXIII


It was of the Free City they had dreamed and that they had not lived
to behold the fulfillment of their dream was, in its way, the final
certification of the validity of their services as pioneers. It is an
old rule of life, or an old trick of the fates that seem so casually
to govern life, that the dreams of mortals are seldom destined to
come true, though mortals sometimes thwart the fates by finding their
dreams in themselves sufficient. In this sense Jones and Johnson had
already been rewarded. It had been a dream of wonder and of beauty,
the vision of a city stately with towers, above which there hung the
glow which poor Jude used to see at evening when he climbed to the
roof of the Brown House on the ridgeway near Marygreen. It was a city
in which there were the living conceptions of justice, pity, mercy,
consideration, toleration, beauty, art, all those graces which mankind
so long has held noblest and most dear. It was a city wherein human
life was precious, and therefore gracious, a city which the citizen
loved as a graduate loves his alma mater, a city with a communal
spirit. There the old ideas of privilege had given way to the ideals of
service, public property was held as sacred as private property, power
was lightly wielded, the people’s voice was intelligent and omnipotent,
for they had learned the wisdom that confuses demagogues, and amid the
interplay of myriad forces, the democratic spirit was ever at work,
performing its noble functions. You might have said that the people
were inspired, since they united so readily in great constructive work,
reducing to order and scientific arrangement all the manifold needs and
expressions of the daily life, conquering in the old struggle against
nature, providing against all that casualty and accident which make
life to-day such a snarl of squalid tragedies and ridiculous comedies
that it well may seem to be ruled by none other than the most whimsical
and spiteful of irresponsible spirits. It was more than a city indeed,
it was a realm of reason, wherein the people at last in good will
were living a social life. The eternal negative, the everlasting no,
had given way to a new affirmation; each morning should ordain new
emancipations, and each evening behold new reconciliations among men.
It was a city wherein the people were achieving more and more of
leisure, that life in all her splendor and her beauty and her glory
might not pass by unhailed, unrecognized even, by so many toiling
thousands. It was the vision of a city set upon a hill, with happy
people singing in the streets.

These words I know but vaguely express the vision that had come to
those two men with the unpoetic names of Johnson and Jones. When I
speak of a city where people sing in the streets I am perfectly well
aware of the smile that touches the lips of sophistication, though the
smile would have been none the less cynical had I mentioned merely
a city in which there were happy people at all. I am perfectly well
aware that such a thing in all literalness is perhaps impossible to the
weary, preoccupied crowds in the streets of any of our cities; it would
be too absurd, too ridiculous, and probably against the law, if not
indeed quite wicked. In Mr. Housman’s somber lines:

  These are not in plight to bear,
  If they would, another’s care.
  They have enough as ’tis: I see
  In many an eye that measures me
  The mortal sickness of a mind
  Too unhappy to be kind.
  Undone with misery, all they can
  Is to hate their fellow man;
  And till they drop they needs must still
  Look at you and wish you ill.

And yet, it is not wholly impossible after all. One evening in
Brussels, hearing the strains of a band I looked out of my hotel
window, and saw a throng of youth and maidens dancing in a mist of rain
down an asphalt pavement that glistened under the electric lights. It
was a sight of such innocence, of such simple joy and gayety as one
could never behold in our cities, and it occasioned no more remark,
was considered no more out of place or unbecoming than it would be for
a man to sprawl on one of our sidewalks and look for a dime he had
dropped. But I happened to use that phrase about singing in the streets
simply because it was one Jones used to employ, just as Johnson used
forever to be talking about his city set on a hill. If Johnson’s phrase
was in an old poetic strain Jones meant literally what he said. He used
to talk of the crowds he had seen along the boulevards of Paris, and
the gayety, impossible to us, in which they had celebrated the 14th of
July, and he talked of all this to such purpose that Toledo became the
first city in America to have a “sane” Fourth of July.

Jones and Johnson, because they had vision, were thinking in sequences
far beyond the material conceptions of the communities about them, and
utterly impossible to skulking city politicians, with their miserable
little treacheries and contemptible and selfish ambitions. They were
imagining a spirit which might and perhaps some day will possess a
whole people. And when I intimated the pity it was that they had not
lived to see that silvery September day when the people of Ohio voted
for municipal autonomy, I did not mean in the least to aver that their
dream had been realized for us, simply because we had secured an
amendment to our fundamental law. Memoranda to this effect had been
noted on the roll of the constitution, but these after all were but the
cold, formal and unlovely terms that expressed concepts which had been
evolving slowly in the public consciousness.

They realized, what all intelligent men must ere long apprehend, that
too great stress has been laid on mere political activity. We have
counted it as of controlling force in human affairs, the energy behind
human activities, the cause, instead of the effect, the motive,
instead of a mere expression of our complex life. They saw more deeply
than politics, they recognized other and mightier influences at work,
affecting the interests and the emotions of men. They knew that there
is after all, an unconscious, subtle wisdom in the general neglect of
politics by the masses of citizens, who intuitively know that other
things are of more importance. They were but seeking to clear the way
for the more fundamental expressions of human interest, human emotions,
human fervors, human liberties. For of course it is not the city that
makes the people free, but the people that make the city free; and
the city cannot be free until the people have been freed from all
their various bondages, free above all from themselves, from their own
ignorances, littlenesses, superstitions, jealousies, envies, suspicions
and fears. And it is not laws that can set them free, nor political
parties, nor organizations, nor commissions, nor any sort of legalistic
machinery. They must themselves set themselves free, and themselves
indeed find out the way.

Nor is that freedom to be defined; its chief value lies, as does
that of any concept of truth, in the fact that it is largely
impressionistic, subject to the alterations and corrections of that
mysterious system of incessant change which is life itself. The value
and even the permanence of many ideals and many truths--for truths
are not always permanent, but are subject to the flux of life--lie in
the fact that they are impressionistic. Reduced to formal lines and
hardened into rigid detail they become something quite otherwise than
that which they were at first or were intended to be.

No, neither for them, nor for us, had the dream come true. But it had
come nearer. It had become possible. Many obstacles had been removed;
many purifications had been wrought, many deliverances achieved. To
Cleveland and to Toledo, those two cities by the lake, the years
had brought their changes. Not objectively, perhaps; outwardly they
were much the same--without form, inharmonious, ugly, with the awful
antitheses of our economic system, and what is worse, the vast welter
of mediocrity and banality between. But there had been ameliorations.
In each of them there were plans traced for beautiful civic centers
with groups of buildings and other public amenities, which, when
realized, would render them comparable in that respect to those old
cities of Europe where the benison of art has descended on the people
from the hands of kings. And these things were coming up out of the
people, despite provincialism and philistinism and politics; there
was a new understanding of sovereignty, not as a menace descending
from above, but as an aspiration coming up from below. And this new
aspiration in the people, pressing with the irresistible urge of
moral sentiment against old institutions will renovate the cities and
recreate the lives in them.

For after all the world grows better. Not as rapidly as we should
like, but yet, in a way, better. The immense sophistication of the
modern mood, to be sure, is apt to cast contemporary thought in the
mould of multifold negation; and sensibilities, long distressed by the
contemplation of life in aspects it would not wear were this more of a
realm of reason, find their only solace in that pessimism which makes
charming so much of modern poetry. Doubtless this is the mood most
congenial to the agnosticism of the reflective, contemplative mind in
the present phase of its philosophy. It has its undoubted fascinations,
its uses, and, indeed, its truth, part reaction though it be from
the excessive strain of contemporary life in cities, and the dull
orthodoxies of the Victorian age. To one, indeed, who, in eight years’
participation in municipal politics might in that respect have been
compared to that character in one of Anatole France’s novels who never
opened a door without coming upon some hitherto unsuspected depth of
infamy in mankind, it was difficult to avoid that strain. And yet, bad
as municipal government has been in this land, it is everywhere better
to-day. The level of moral sentiment, like the level of intelligence,
mounts slowly, in wide spirals, but it mounts steadily all the time. In
not every city has the advance been so marked, for not every city has
had such personalities as Johnson and Jones, and without personalities,
democracies seem unable to function. The old corruptions, once so
flagrant, are growing less and less, and there is left only the
residuum of meanness and pettiness and spite, the crimes that require
no courage and entail no fear of the law, committed by beings who
never could attain the robust stature of the old and brazen and robust
offenders. The strain is running out, attenuating, and ere long will
be extinct.

Those gentle pessimists of such congenial culture may indeed point
to other ages that excel ours, say in speculative thought, and all
the five arts, but I think it is demonstrable that upon the whole,
and employing long epochs for the comparison, things are growing
better. Notwithstanding all the ignorance and all the woe in the world
to-night, never before has there been such widespread opportunity for
enlightenment, never such widespread comfort, never so much kindness,
so much pity for animals, for children, and, above all, never have
women been shown such consideration. It needs no very powerful
imagination, peering into the shadowy background of human history,
to appreciate the tremendous implications of this fact. Indeed the
great feminist movement of our time, a movement which in the histories
of mankind centuries hence will be given the sectional mark of the
beginning of a new age, is in itself the proof of a great advance, in
which the ballot will be the very least important of all the liberties
to be won.

With all the complications of this vast and confusing interplay of
the forces of this age, the city is inextricably bound by its awful
responsibility for so much that is bad, for so much that is good, in
our time. And in the cities, now as always, the struggle for liberty
will go on. The old leaders will pass, and the new will pass, and pass
swiftly, for they are quickly consumed in the stress and heat of the
passionate and savage struggle. To them must ever come the fatigue of
long drawn opposition, of the repeated and unavailing assaults on the
cold, solid and impregnable walls of institutions. In this fatigue they
may grow conservative after a while, and they should pray to be spared
the acquiescence of the middle years, the base capitulation of age.

But always the people remain, pressing onward in a great stream up
the slopes, and always somehow toward the light. For the great dream
beckons, leads them on, the dream of social harmony always prefigured
in human thought as the city. This radiant vision of the city is the
oldest dream in the world. All literature is saturated with it. It
has been the ideal of human achievement since the day when the men on
the plains of Shinar sought to build a city whose towers should reach
unto heaven. It was the angelic vision of the mystic on Patmos, the
city descending out of heaven, and lying foursquare, the city where
there was to be no more sorrow nor crying. It has been the goal of
civilization down to this hour of the night, when, however vaguely and
dimly, the ideal stirs the thousands in this feverish town going about
their strange and various businesses, pleasures, devotions, sacrifices,
sins. It has been the everlasting dream of humanity. And humanity will
continue to struggle for it, to struggle toward it. And some day,
somewhere, to the sons of men the dream will come true.


THE END




FOOTNOTES:

[A] These have been collected and published under the title, “Letters
of Labor and Love,” by Samuel M. Jones, The Bobbs-Merrill Co.,
Indianapolis.

[B] “On the Enforcement of Law in Cities,” Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis,
1913.

[C] “The Truth About the White Slave Traffic,” by Teressa
Billington-Greig. _The English Review_, June, 1913.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.




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