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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

by

WALTER LIPPMANN

"A God wilt thou create for thyself
out of thy seven devils."

Mitchell Kennerley
New York and London
1914
Copyright, 1913, by
Mitchell Kennerley

_Contents_

CHAPTER                                                    PAGE

       INTRODUCTION

   I.  Routineer and Inventor                                 1

  II. The Taboo                                              34

 III.  The Changing Focus                                    53

  IV.  The Golden Rule and After                             86

   V. Well Meaning but Unmeaning: the Chicago Vice Report   122

  VI. Some Necessary Iconoclasm                             159

 VII. The Making of Creeds                                  204

VIII. The Red Herring                                       247

  IX.  Revolution and Culture                               273

INTRODUCTION

The most incisive comment on politics to-day is indifference. When men
and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter
very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise,
the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts.
Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings
by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public
affairs recognize this. They know that no attack is so disastrous as
silence, that no invective is so blasting as the wise and indulgent smile
of the people who do not care. Eager to believe that all the world is as
interested as they are, there comes a time when even the reformer is
compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that
politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing. But
such moments of illumination are rare. They appear in writers who realize
how large is the public that doesn't read their books, in reformers who
venture to compare the membership list of their league with the census of
the United States. Whoever has been granted such a moment of insight
knows how exquisitely painful it is. To conquer it men turn generally to
their ancient comforter, self-deception: they complain about the stolid,
inert masses and the apathy of the people. In a more confidential tone
they will tell you that the ordinary citizen is a "hopelessly private
person."

The reformer is himself not lacking in stolidity if he can believe such a
fiction of a people that crowds about tickers and demands the news of the
day before it happens, that trembles on the verge of a panic over the
unguarded utterance of a financier, and founds a new religion every month
or so. But after a while self-deception ceases to be a comfort. This is
when the reformer notices how indifference to politics is settling upon
some of the most alert minds of our generation, entering into the
attitude of men as capable as any reformer of large and imaginative
interests. For among the keenest minds, among artists, scientists and
philosophers, there is a remarkable inclination to make a virtue of
political indifference. Too passionate an absorption in public affairs is
felt to be a somewhat shallow performance, and the reformer is patronized
as a well-meaning but rather dull fellow. This is the criticism of men
engaged in some genuinely creative labor. Often it is unexpressed, often
as not the artist or scientist will join in a political movement. But in
the depths of his soul there is, I suspect, some feeling which says to
the politician, "Why so hot, my little sir?"

Nothing, too, is more illuminating than the painful way in which many
people cultivate a knowledge of public affairs because they have a
conscience and wish to do a citizen's duty. Having read a number of
articles on the tariff and ploughed through the metaphysics of the
currency question, what do they do? They turn with all the more zest to
some spontaneous human interest. Perhaps they follow, follow, follow
Roosevelt everywhere, and live with him through the emotions of a great
battle. But for the affairs of statecraft, for the very policies that a
Roosevelt advocates, the interest is largely perfunctory, maintained out
of a sense of duty and dropped with a sigh of relief.

That reaction may not be as deplorable as it seems. Pick up your
newspaper, read the Congressional Record, run over in your mind the
"issues" of a campaign, and then ask yourself whether the average man is
entirely to blame because he smiles a bit at Armageddon and refuses to
take the politician at his own rhetorical valuation. If men find
statecraft uninteresting, may it not be that statecraft _is_
uninteresting? I have a more or less professional interest in public
affairs; that is to say, I have had opportunity to look at politics from
the point of view of the man who is trying to get the attention of people
in order to carry through some reform. At first it was a hard confession
to make, but the more I saw of politics at first-hand, the more I
respected the indifference of the public. There was something
monotonously trivial and irrelevant about our reformist enthusiasm, and
an appalling justice in that half-conscious criticism which refuses to
place politics among the genuine, creative activities of men. Science was
valid, art was valid, the poorest grubber in a laboratory was engaged in
a real labor, anyone who had found expression in some beautiful object
was truly centered. But politics was a personal drama without meaning or
a vague abstraction without substance.

Yet there was the fact, just as indisputable as ever, that public affairs
do have an enormous and intimate effect upon our lives. They make or
unmake us. They are the foundation of that national vigor through which
civilizations mature. City and countryside, factories and play, schools
and the family are powerful influences in every life, and politics is
directly concerned with them. If politics is irrelevant, it is certainly
not because its subject matter is unimportant. Public affairs govern our
thinking and doing with subtlety and persistence.

The trouble, I figured, must be in the way politics is concerned with the
nation's interests. If public business seems to drift aimlessly, its
results are, nevertheless, of the highest consequence. In statecraft the
penalties and rewards are tremendous. Perhaps the approach is distorted.
Perhaps uncriticised assumptions have obscured the real uses of politics.
Perhaps an attitude can be worked out which will engage a fresher
attention. For there are, I believe, blunders in our political thinking
which confuse fictitious activity with genuine achievement, and make it
difficult for men to know where they should enlist. Perhaps if we can see
politics in a different light, it will rivet our creative interests.

These essays, then, are an attempt to sketch an attitude towards
statecraft. I have tried to suggest an approach, to illustrate it
concretely, to prepare a point of view. In selecting for the title "A
Preface to Politics," I have wished to stamp upon the whole book my own
sense that it is a beginning and not a conclusion. I have wished to
emphasize that there is nothing in this book which can be drafted into a
legislative proposal and presented to the legislature the day after
to-morrow. It was not written with the notion that these pages would
contain an adequate exposition of modern political method. Much less was
it written to further a concrete program. There are, I hope, no
assumptions put forward as dogmas.

It is a preliminary sketch for a theory of politics, a preface to
thinking. Like all speculation about human affairs, it is the result of a
grapple with problems as they appear in the experience of one man. For
though a personal vision may at times assume an eloquent and universal
language, it is well never to forget that all philosophies are the
language of particular men.

                                                  W. L.

46 East 80th Street, NEW YORK CITY, January 1913.

A PREFACE TO POLITICS

CHAPTER I

ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR

Politics does not exist for the sake of demonstrating the superior
righteousness of anybody. It is not a competition in deportment. In fact,
before you can begin to think about politics at all you have to abandon
the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men. That is one
of the great American superstitions. More than any other fetish it has
ruined our sense of political values by glorifying the pharisee with his
vain cruelty to individuals and his unfounded approval of himself. You
have only to look at the Senate of the United States, to see how that
body is capable of turning itself into a court of preliminary hearings
for the Last Judgment, wasting its time and our time and absorbing public
enthusiasm and newspaper scareheads. For a hundred needs of the nation it
has no thought, but about the precise morality of an historical
transaction eight years old there is a meticulous interest. Whether in
the Presidential Campaign of 1904 Roosevelt was aware that the ancient
tradition of corporate subscriptions had or had not been followed, and
the exact and ultimate measure of the guilt that knowledge would have
implied--this in the year 1912 is enough to start the Senate on a
protracted man-hunt.

Now if one half of the people is bent upon proving how wicked a man is
and the other half is determined to show how good he is, neither half
will think very much about the nation. An innocent paragraph in the New
York Evening Post for August 27, 1912, gives the whole performance away.
It shows as clearly as words could how disastrous the good-and-bad-man
theory is to political thinking:

"Provided the first hearing takes place on September 30, it is expected
that the developments will be made with a view to keeping the Colonel on
the defensive. After the beginning of October, it is pointed out, the
evidence before the Committee should keep him so busy explaining and
denying that the country will not hear much Bull Moose doctrine."

Whether you like the Roosevelt doctrines or not, there can be no two
opinions about such an abuse of morality. It is a flat public loss,
another attempt to befuddle our thinking. For if politics is merely a
guerilla war between the bribed and the unbribed, then statecraft is not
a human service but a moral testing ground. It is a public amusement, a
melodrama of real life, in which a few conspicuous characters are tried,
and it resembles nothing so much as schoolboy hazing which we are told
exists for the high purpose of detecting a "yellow streak." But even
though we desired it there would be no way of establishing any clear-cut
difference in politics between the angels and the imps. The angels are
largely self-appointed, being somewhat more sensitive to other people's
tar than their own.

But if the issue is not between honesty and dishonesty, where is it?

If you stare at a checkerboard you can see it as black on red, or red on
black, as series of horizontal, vertical or diagonal steps which recede
or protrude. The longer you look the more patterns you can trace, and the
more certain it becomes that there is no single way of looking at the
board. So with political issues. There is no obvious cleavage which
everyone recognizes. Many patterns appear in the national life. The
"progressives" say the issue is between "Privilege" and the "People"; the
Socialists, that it is between the "working class" and the "master
class." An apologist for dynamite told me once that society was divided
into the weak and the strong, and there are people who draw a line
between Philistia and Bohemia.

When you rise up and announce that the conflict is between this and that,
you mean that this particular conflict interests you. The issue of
good-and-bad-men interests this nation to the exclusion of almost all
others. But experience shows, I believe, that it is a fruitless conflict
and a wasting enthusiasm. Yet some distinction must be drawn if we are to
act at all in politics. With nothing we are for and nothing to oppose, we
are merely neutral. This cleavage in public affairs is the most important
choice we are called upon to make. In large measure it determines the
rest of our thinking. Now some issues are fertile; some are not. Some
lead to spacious results; others are blind alleys. With this in mind I
wish to suggest that the distinction most worth emphasizing to-day is
between those who regard government as a routine to be administered and
those who regard it as a problem to be solved.

The class of routineers is larger than the conservatives. The man who
will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example
of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service,
in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as
unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the
tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from
under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human,
temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens
above him is nothing but the roof.

He is the slave of routine. He can boast of somewhat more spiritual
cousins in the men who reverence their ancestors' independence, who feel,
as it were, that a disreputable great-grandfather is necessary to a
family's respectability. These are the routineers gifted with historical
sense. They take their forefathers with enormous solemnity. But one
mistake is rarely avoided: they imitate the old-fashioned thing their
grandfather did, and ignore the originality which enabled him to do it.

If tradition were a reverent record of those crucial moments when men
burst through their habits, a love of the past would not be the butt on
which every sophomoric radical can practice his wit. But almost always
tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the
habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to
the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers' glory--to the
archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth
century contrivance by which for a time it was served. To reverence
Washington they wear a powdered wig; they do honor to Lincoln by
cultivating awkward hands and ungainly feet.

It is fascinating to watch this kind of conservative in action. From
Senator Lodge, for example, we do not expect any new perception of
popular need. We know that probably his deepest sincerity is an attempt
to reproduce the atmosphere of the Senate a hundred years ago. The
manners of Mr. Lodge have that immobility which comes from too much
gazing at bad statues of dead statesmen.

Yet just because a man is in opposition to Senator Lodge there is no
guarantee that he has freed himself from the routineer's habit of mind. A
prejudice against some mannerism or a dislike of pretensions may merely
cloak some other kind of routine. Take the "good government" attitude. No
fresh insight is behind that. It does not promise anything; it does not
offer to contribute new values to human life. The machine which exists is
accepted in all its essentials: the "goo-goo" yearns for a somewhat
smoother rotation.

Often as not the very effort to make the existing machine run more
perfectly merely makes matters worse. For the tinkering reformer is
frequently one of the worst of the routineers. Even machines are not
altogether inflexible, and sometimes what the reformer regards as a sad
deviation from the original plans is a poor rickety attempt to adapt the
machine to changing conditions. Think what would have happened had we
actually remained stolidly faithful to every intention of the Fathers.
Think what would happen if every statute were enforced. By the sheer
force of circumstances we have twisted constitutions and laws to some
approximation of our needs. A changing country has managed to live in
spite of a static government machine. Perhaps Bernard Shaw was right when
he said that "the famous Constitution survives only because whenever any
corner of it gets into the way of the accumulating dollar it is pettishly
knocked off and thrown away. Every social development, however beneficial
and inevitable from the public point of view, is met, not by an
intelligent adaptation of the social structure to its novelties but by a
panic and a cry of Go Back."

I am tempted to go further and put into the same class all those radicals
who wish simply to substitute some other kind of machine for the one we
have. Though not all of them would accept the name, these reformers are
simply utopia-makers in action. Their perceptions are more critical than
the ordinary conservatives'. They do see that humanity is badly squeezed
in the existing mould. They have enough imagination to conceive a
different one. But they have an infinite faith in moulds. This routine
they don't believe in, but they believe in their own: if you could put
the country under a new "system," then human affairs would run
automatically for the welfare of all. Some improvement there might be,
but as almost all men are held in an iron devotion to their own
creations, the routine reformers are simply working for another
conservatism, and not for any continuing liberation.

The type of statesman we must oppose to the routineer is one who regards
all social organization as an instrument. Systems, institutions and
mechanical contrivances have for him no virtue of their own: they are
valuable only when they serve the purposes of men. He uses them, of
course, but with a constant sense that men have made them, that new ones
can be devised, that only an effort of the will can keep machinery in its
place. He has no faith whatever in automatic governments. While the
routineers see machinery and precedents revolving with mankind as
puppets, he puts the deliberate, conscious, willing individual at the
center of his philosophy. This reversal is pregnant with a new outlook
for statecraft. I hope to show that it alone can keep step with life; it
alone is humanly relevant; and it alone achieves valuable results.

Call this man a political creator or a political inventor. The essential
quality of him is that he makes that part of existence which has
experience the master of it. He serves the ideals of human feelings, not
the tendencies of mechanical things.

The difference between a phonograph and the human voice is that the
phonograph must sing the song which is stamped upon it. Now there are
days--I suspect the vast majority of them in most of our lives--when we
grind out the thing that is stamped upon us. It may be the governing of a
city, or teaching school, or running a business. We do not get out of bed
in the morning because we are eager for the day; something external--we
often call it our duty--throws off the bed-clothes, complains that the
shaving water isn't hot, puts us into the subway and lands us at our
office in season for punching the time-check. We revolve with the
business for three or four hours, signing letters, answering telephones,
checking up lists, and perhaps towards twelve o'clock the prospect of
lunch puts a touch of romance upon life. Then because our days are so
unutterably the same, we turn to the newspapers, we go to the magazines
and read only the "stuff with punch," we seek out a "show" and drive
serious playwrights into the poorhouse. "You can go through contemporary
life," writes Wells, "fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never
really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest
moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with
primary and elementary necessities the sweat of your death-bed."

The world grinds on: we are a fly on the wheel. That sense of an
impersonal machine going on with endless reiteration is an experience
that imaginative politicians face. Often as not they disguise it under
heroic phrases and still louder affirmation, just as most of us hide our
cowardly submission to monotony under some word like duty, loyalty,
conscience. If you have ever been an office-holder or been close to
officials, you must surely have been appalled by the grim way in which
committee-meetings, verbose reports, flamboyant speeches, requests, and
delegations hold the statesman in a mind-destroying grasp. Perhaps this
is the reason why it has been necessary to retire Theodore Roosevelt from
public life every now and then in order to give him a chance to learn
something new. Every statesman like every professor should have his
sabbatical year.

The revolt against the service of our own mechanical habits is well known
to anyone who has followed modern thought. As a sharp example one might
point to Thomas Davidson, whom William James called "individualist à
outrance".... "Reprehending (mildly) a certain chapter of my own on
'Habit,' he said that it was a fixed rule with him to form no regular
habits. When he found himself in danger of settling into even a good one,
he made a point of interrupting it."

Such men are the sparkling streams that flow through the dusty stretches
of a nation. They invigorate and emphasize those times in your own life
when each day is new. Then you are alive, then you drive the world before
you. The business, however difficult, shapes itself to your effort; you
seem to manage detail with an inferior part of yourself, while the real
soul of you is active, planning, light. "I wanted thought like an edge of
steel and desire like a flame." Eager with sympathy, you and your work
are reflected from many angles. You have become luminous.

Some people are predominantly eager and wilful. The world does not huddle
and bend them to a task. They are not, as we say, creatures of
environment, but creators of it. Of other people's environment they
become the most active part--the part which sets the fashion. What they
initiate, others imitate. Theirs is a kind of intrinsic prestige. These
are the natural leaders of men, whether it be as head of the gang or as
founder of a religion.

It is, I believe, this power of being aggressively active towards the
world which gives man a miraculous assurance that the world is something
he can make. In creative moments men always draw upon "some secret spring
of certainty, some fundamental well into which no disturbing glimmers
penetrate." But this is no slack philosophy, for the chance is denied by
which we can lie back upon the perfection of some mechanical contrivance.
Yet in the light of it government becomes alert to a process of continual
creation, an unceasing invention of forms to meet constantly changing
needs.

This philosophy is not only difficult to practice: it is elusive when you
come to state it. For our political language was made to express a
routine conception of government. It comes to us from the Eighteenth
Century. And no matter how much we talk about the infusion of the
"evolutionary" point of view into all of modern thought, when the test is
made political practice shows itself almost virgin to the idea. Our
theories assume, and our language is fitted to thinking of government as
a frame--Massachusetts, I believe, actually calls her fundamental law the
Frame of Government. We picture political institutions as mechanically
constructed contrivances within which the nation's life is contained and
compelled to approximate some abstract idea of justice or liberty. These
frames have very little elasticity, and we take it as an historical
commonplace that sooner or later a revolution must come to burst the
frame apart. Then a new one is constructed.

Our own Federal Constitution is a striking example of this machine
conception of government. It is probably the most important instance we
have of the deliberate application of a mechanical philosophy to human
affairs. Leaving out all question of the Fathers' ideals, looking simply
at the bias which directed their thinking, is there in all the world a
more plain-spoken attempt to contrive an automatic governor--a machine
which would preserve its balance without the need of taking human nature
into account? What other explanation is there for the naïve faith of the
Fathers in the "symmetry" of executive, legislature, and judiciary; in
the fantastic attempts to circumvent human folly by balancing it with
vetoes and checks? No insight into the evident fact that power upsets all
mechanical foresight and gravitates toward the natural leaders seems to
have illuminated those historic deliberations. The Fathers had a rather
pale god, they had only a speaking acquaintance with humanity, so they
put their faith in a scaffold, and it has been part of our national piety
to pretend that they succeeded.

They worked with the philosophy of their age. Living in the Eighteenth
Century, they thought in the images of Newton and Montesquieu. "The
Government of the United States," writes Woodrow Wilson, "was constructed
upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of
unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe.... As
Montesquieu pointed out to them (the English Whigs) in his lucid way,
they had sought to balance executive, legislative and judiciary off
against one another by a series of checks and counterpoises, which Newton
might readily have recognized as suggestive of the mechanism of the
heavens." No doubt this automatic and balanced theory of government
suited admirably that distrust of the people which seems to have been a
dominant feeling among the Fathers. For they were the conservatives of
their day: between '76 and '89 they had gone the usual way of opportunist
radicals. But had they written the Constitution in the fire of their
youth, they might have made it more democratic,--I doubt whether they
would have made it less mechanical. The rebellious spirit of Tom Paine
expressed itself in logical formulæ as inflexible to the pace of life as
did the more contented Hamilton's. This is a determinant which burrows
beneath our ordinary classification of progressive and reactionary to the
spiritual habits of a period.

If you look into the early utopias of Fourier and Saint-Simon, or better
still into the early trade unions, this same faith that a government can
be made to work mechanically is predominant everywhere. All the devices
of rotation in office, short terms, undelegated authority are simply
attempts to defeat the half-perceived fact that power will not long stay
diffused. It is characteristic of these primitive democracies that they
worship Man and distrust men. They cling to some arrangement, hoping
against experience that a government freed from human nature will
automatically produce human benefits. To-day within the Socialist Party
there is perhaps the greatest surviving example of the desire to offset
natural leadership by artificial contrivance. It is an article of faith
among orthodox socialists that personalities do not count, and I
sincerely believe I am not exaggerating the case when I say that their
ideal of government is like Gordon Craig's ideal of the theater--the
acting is to be done by a row of supermarionettes. There is a myth among
socialists to which all are expected to subscribe, that initiative
springs anonymously out of the mass of the people,--that there are no
"leaders," that the conspicuous figures are no more influential than the
figurehead on the prow of a ship.

This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement--that it loves a
crowd and fears the individuals who compose it--that the religion of
humanity should have had no faith in human beings. Jealous of all
individuals, democracies have turned to machines. They have tried to blot
out human prestige, to minimize the influence of personality. That there
is historical justification for this fear is plain enough. To put it
briefly, democracy is afraid of the tyrant. That explains, but does not
justify. Governments have to be carried on by men, however much we
distrust them. Nobody has yet invented a mechanically beneficent
sovereign.

Democracy has put an unfounded faith in automatic contrivances. Because
it left personality out of its speculation, it rested in the empty faith
that it had excluded it from reality. But in the actual stress of life
these frictions do not survive ten minutes. Public officials do not
become political marionettes, though people pretend that they are. When
theory runs against the grain of living forces, the result is a deceptive
theory of politics. If the real government of the United States "had, in
fact," as Woodrow Wilson says, "been a machine governed by mechanically
automatic balances, it would have had no history; but it was not, and its
history has been rich with the influence and personalities of the men who
have conducted it and made it a living reality." Only by violating the
very spirit of the constitution have we been able to preserve the letter
of it. For behind that balanced plan there grew up what Senator Beveridge
has called so brilliantly the "invisible government," an empire of
natural groups about natural leaders. Parties are such groups: they have
had a power out of all proportion to the intentions of the Fathers.
Behind the parties has grown up the "political machine"--falsely called a
machine, the very opposite of one in fact, a natural sovereignty, I
believe. The really rigid and mechanical thing is the charter behind
which Tammany works. For Tammany is the real government that has defeated
a mechanical foresight. Tammany is not a freak, a strange and monstrous
excrescence. Its structure and the laws of its life are, I believe,
typical of all real sovereignties. You can find Tammany duplicated
wherever there is a social group to be governed--in trade unions, in
clubs, in boys' gangs, in the Four Hundred, in the Socialist Party. It is
an accretion of power around a center of influence, cemented by
patronage, graft, favors, friendship, loyalties, habits,--a human
grouping, a natural pyramid.

Only recently have we begun to see that the "political ring" is not
something confined to public life. It was Lincoln Steffens, I believe,
who first perceived that fact. For a time it was my privilege to work
under him on an investigation of the "Money Power." The leading idea was
different from customary "muckraking." We were looking not for the evils
of Big Business, but for its anatomy. Mr. Steffens came to the subject
with a first-hand knowledge of politics. He knew the "invisible
government" of cities, states, and the nation. He knew how the boss
worked, how he organized his power. When Mr. Steffens approached the vast
confusion and complication of big business, he needed some hypothesis to
guide him through that maze of facts. He made a bold and brilliant guess,
an hypothesis. To govern a life insurance company, Mr. Steffens argued,
was just as much "government" as to run a city. What if political methods
existed in the realm of business? The investigation was never carried
through completely, but we did study the methods by which several life
and fire insurance companies, banks, two or three railroads, and several
industrials are controlled. We found that the anatomy of Big Business was
strikingly like that of Tammany Hall: the same pyramiding of influence,
the same tendency of power to center on individuals who did not
necessarily sit in the official seats, the same effort of human
organization to grow independently of legal arrangements. Thus in the
life insurance companies, and the Hughes investigation supports this, the
real power was held not by the president, not by the voters or
policy-holders, but by men who were not even directors. After a while we
took it as a matter of course that the head of a company was an
administrative dummy, with a dependence on unofficial power similar to
that of Governor Dix on Boss Murphy. That seems to be typical of the
whole economic life of this country. It is controlled by groups of men
whose influence extends like a web to smaller, tributary groups, cutting
across all official boundaries and designations, making short work of all
legal formulæ, and exercising sovereignty regardless of the little fences
we erect to keep it in bounds.

A glimpse into the labor world revealed very much the same condition. The
boss, and the bosslet, the heeler--the men who are "it"--all are there
exercising the real power, the power that independently of charters and
elections decides what shall happen. I don't wish to have this regarded
as necessarily malign. It seems so now because we put our faith in the
ideal arrangements which it disturbs. But if we could come to face it
squarely--to see that that is what sovereignty is--that if we are to use
human power for human purposes we must turn to the realities of it, then
we shall have gone far towards leaving behind us the futile hopes of
mechanical perfection so constantly blasted by natural facts.

The invisible government is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the
fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution.
What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and
are compelled to submit to it. The nature of political power we shall not
change. If that is the way human societies organize sovereignty, the
sooner we face that fact the better. For the object of democracy is not
to imitate the rhythm of the stars but to harness political power to the
nation's need. If corporations and governments have indeed gone on a joy
ride the business of reform is not to set up fences, Sherman Acts and
injunctions into which they can bump, but to take the wheel and to steer.

The corruption of which we hear so much is certainly not accounted for
when you have called it dishonesty. It is too widespread for any such
glib explanation. When you see how business controls politics, it
certainly is not very illuminating to call the successful business men of
a nation criminals. Yet I suppose that all of them violate the law. May
not this constant dodging or hurdling of statutes be a sign that there is
something the matter with the statutes? Is it not possible that graft is
the cracking and bursting of the receptacles in which we have tried to
constrain the business of this country? It seems possible that business
has had to control politics because its laws were so stupidly
obstructive. In the trust agitation this is especially plausible. For
there is every reason to believe that concentration is a world-wide
tendency, made possible at first by mechanical inventions, fostered by
the disastrous experiences of competition, and accepted by business men
through contagion and imitation. Certainly the trusts increase. Wherever
politics is rigid and hostile to that tendency, there is irritation and
struggle, but the agglomeration goes on. Hindered by political
conditions, the process becomes secretive and morbid. The trust is not
checked, but it is perverted. In 1910 the "American Banker" estimated
that there were 1,198 corporations with 8,110 subsidiaries liable to all
the penalties of the Sherman Act. Now this concentration must represent a
profound impetus in the business world--an impetus which certainly cannot
be obliterated, even if anyone were foolish enough to wish it. I venture
to suggest that much of what is called "corruption" is the odor of a
decaying political system done to death by an economic growth.

It is our desperate adherence to an old method that has produced the
confusion of political life. Because we have insisted upon looking at
government as a frame and governing as a routine, because in short we
have been static in our theories, politics has such an unreal relation to
actual conditions. Feckless--that is what our politics is. It is
literally eccentric: it has been centered mechanically instead of
vitally. We have, it seems, been seduced by a fictitious analogy: we have
hoped for machine regularity when we needed human initiative and
leadership, when life was crying that its inventive abilities should be
freed.

Roosevelt in his term did much to center government truly. For a time
natural leadership and nominal position coincided, and the administration
became in a measure a real sovereignty. The routine conception dwindled,
and the Roosevelt appointees went at issues as problems to be solved.
They may have been mistaken: Roosevelt may be uncritical in his
judgments. But the fact remains that the Roosevelt régime gave a new
prestige to the Presidency by effecting through it the greatest release
of political invention in a generation. Contrast it with the Taft
administration, and the quality is set in relief. Taft was the perfect
routineer trying to run government as automatically as possible. His
sincerity consisted in utter respect for form: he denied himself whatever
leadership he was capable of, and outwardly at least he tried to
"balance" the government. His greatest passions seem to be purely
administrative and legal. The people did not like it. They said it was
dead. They were right. They had grown accustomed to a humanly liberating
atmosphere in which formality was an instrument instead of an idol. They
had seen the Roosevelt influence adding to the resources of
life--irrigation, and waterways, conservation, the Panama Canal, the
"country life" movement. They knew these things were achieved through
initiative that burst through formal restrictions, and they applauded
wildly. It was only a taste, but it was a taste, a taste of what
government might be like.

The opposition was instructive. Apart from those who feared Roosevelt for
selfish reasons, his enemies were men who loved an orderly adherence to
traditional methods. They shivered in the emotional gale; they obstructed
and the gale became destructive. They felt that, along with obviously
good things, this sudden national fertility might breed a monster--that a
leadership like Roosevelt's might indeed prove dangerous, as giving birth
may lead to death.

What the methodically-minded do not see is that the sterility of a
routine is far more appalling. Not everyone may feel that to push out
into the untried, and take risks for big prizes, is worth while. Men will
tell you that government has no business to undertake an adventure, to
make experiments. They think that safety lies in repetition, that if you
do nothing, nothing will be done to you. It's a mistake due to poverty of
imagination and inability to learn from experience. Even the timidest
soul dare not "stand pat." The indictment against mere routine in
government is a staggering one.

For while statesmen are pottering along doing the same thing year in,
year out, putting up the tariff one year and down the next, passing
appropriation bills and recodifying laws, the real forces in the country
do not stand still. Vast changes, economic and psychological, take place,
and these changes demand new guidance. But the routineers are always
unprepared. It has become one of the grim trade jokes of innovators that
the one thing you can count upon is that the rulers will come to think
that they are the apex of human development. For a queer effect of
responsibility on men is that it makes them try to be as much like
machines as possible. Tammany itself becomes rigid when it is too
successful, and only defeat seems to give it new life. Success makes men
rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired
of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism. But
conditions change whether statesmen wish them to or not; society must
have new institutions to fit new wants, and all that rigid conservatism
can do is to make the transitions difficult. Violent revolutions may be
charged up to the unreadiness of statesmen. It is because they will not
see, or cannot see, that feudalism is dead, that chattel slavery is
antiquated; it is because they have not the wisdom and the audacity to
anticipate these great social changes; it is because they insist upon
standing pat that we have French Revolutions and Civil Wars.

But statesmen who had decided that at last men were to be the masters of
their own history, instead of its victims, would face politics in a truly
revolutionary manner. It would give a new outlook to statesmanship,
turning it from the mere preservation of order, the administration of
political machinery and the guarding of ancient privilege to the
invention of new political forms, the prevision of social wants, and the
preparation for new economic growths.

Such a statesmanship would in the '80's have prepared for the trust
movement. There would have been nothing miraculous in such foresight.
Standard Oil was dominant by the beginning of the '80's, and
concentration had begun in sugar, steel and other basic industries. Here
was an economic tendency of revolutionary significance--the organization
of business in a way that was bound to change the outlook of a whole
nation. It had vast potentialities for good and evil--all it wanted was
harnessing and directing. But the new thing did not fit into the little
outlines and verbosities which served as a philosophy for our political
hacks. So they gaped at it and let it run wild, called it names, and
threw stones at it. And by that time the force was too big for them. An
alert statesmanship would have facilitated the process of concentration;
would have made provision for those who were cast aside; would have been
an ally of trust building, and by that very fact it would have had an
internal grip on the trust--it would have kept the trust's inner workings
public; it could have bent the trust to social uses.

This is not mere wisdom after the event. In the '80's there were hundreds
of thousands of people in the world who understood that the trust was a
natural economic growth. Karl Marx had proclaimed it some thirty years
before, and it was a widely circulated idea. Is it asking too much of a
statesman if we expect him to know political theory and to balance it
with the facts he sees? By the '90's surely, the egregious folly of a
Sherman Anti-Trust Law should have been evident to any man who pretended
to political leadership. Yet here it is the year 1912 and that monument
of economic ignorance and superstition is still worshiped with the lips
by two out of the three big national parties.

Another movement--like that of the trust--is gathering strength to-day.
It is the unification of wage-workers. We stand in relation to it as the
men of the '80's did to the trusts. It is the complement of that problem.
It also has vast potentialities for good and evil. It, too, demands
understanding and direction. It, too, will not be stopped by hard names
or injunctions.

What we loosely call "syndicalism" is a tendency that no statesman can
overlook to-day without earning the jeers of his children. This labor
movement has a destructive and constructive energy within it. On its
beneficent side it promises a new professional interest in work,
self-education, and the co-operative management of industry. But this
creative power is constantly choked off because the unions are compelled
to fight for their lives--the more opposition they meet the more you are
likely to see of sabotage, direct action, the grève perlée--the less
chance there is for the educative forces to show themselves. Then, the
more violent syndicalism proves itself to be, the more hysterically we
bait it in the usual vicious circle of ignorance.

But who amongst us is optimistic enough to hope that the men who sit in
the mighty positions are going to make a better show of themselves than
their predecessors did over the trust problem? It strains hope a little
too much. Those men in Washington, most of them lawyers, are so educated
that they are practically incapable of meeting a new condition. All their
training plus all their natural ossification of mind is hostile to
invention. You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the
jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.

The thought-processes in Washington are too lumbering for the needs of
this nation. Against that evil muckraking ought to be directed. Those
senators and representatives are largely irrelevant; they are not
concerned with realities. Their dishonesties are comparatively
insignificant. The scorn of the public should be turned upon the
emptiness of political thought, upon the fact that those men seem without
even a conception of the nation's needs. And while they maunder along
they stifle the forces of life which are trying to break through. It was
nothing but the insolence of the routineer that forced Gifford Pinchot
out of the Forest Service. Pinchot in respect to his subject was a fine
political inventor. But routine forced him out--into what?--into the moil
and toil of fighting for offices, and there he has cut a poor figure
indeed. You may say that he has had to spend his energy trying to find a
chance to use his power. What a wanton waste of talent is that for a
civilized nation! Wiley is another case of the creative mind harassed by
the routineers. Judge Lindsey is another--a fine, constructive children's
judge compelled to be a politician. And of our misuse of the Rockefellers
and Carnegies--the retrospect is appalling. Here was industrial genius
unquestionably beyond the ordinary. What did this nation do with it? It
found no public use for talent. It left that to operate in darkness--then
opinion rose in an empty fury, made an outlaw of one and a platitudinous
philanthropist of the other. It could lynch one as a moral monster, when
as a matter of fact his ideals were commonplace; it could proclaim one a
great benefactor when in truth he was a rather dull old gentleman. Abused
out of all reason or praised irrelevantly--the one thing this nation has
not been able to do with these men is to use their genius. It is this
life-sapping quality of our politics that should be fought--its wanton
waste of the initiatives we have--its stupid indifference.

We need a new sense of political values. These times require a different
order of thinking. We cannot expect to meet our problems with a few
inherited ideas, uncriticised assumptions, a foggy vocabulary, and a
machine philosophy. Our political thinking needs the infusion of
contemporary insights. The enormous vitality that is regenerating other
interests can be brought into the service of politics. Our primary care
must be to keep the habits of the mind flexible and adapted to the
movement of real life. The only way to control our destiny is to work
with it. In politics, at least, we stoop to conquer. There is no use, no
heroism, in butting against the inevitable, yet nothing is entirely
inevitable. There is always some choice, some opportunity for human
direction.

It is not easy. It is far easier to treat life as if it were dead, men as
if they were dolls. It is everlastingly difficult to keep the mind
flexible and alert. The rule of thumb is not here. To follow the pace of
living requires enormous vigilance and sympathy. No one can write
conclusively about it. Compared with this creative statesmanship, the
administering of a routine or the battle for a platitude is a very simple
affair. But genuine politics is not an inhuman task. Part of the
genuineness is its unpretentious humanity. I am not creating the figure
of an ideal statesman out of some inner fancy. That is just the deepest
error of our political thinking--to talk of politics without reference to
human beings. The creative men appear in public life in spite of the cold
blanket the politicians throw over them. Really statesmanlike things are
done, inventions are made. But this real achievement comes to us
confused, mixed with much that is contradictory. Political inventors are
to-day largely unconscious of their purpose, and, so, defenceless against
the distraction of their routineer enemies.

Lacking a philosophy they are defenceless against their own inner
tendency to sink into repetition. As a witty Frenchman remarked, many
geniuses become their own disciples. This is true when the attention is
slack, and effort has lost its direction. We have elaborate governmental
mechanisms--like the tariff, for example, which we go on making more
"scientific" year in, year out--having long since lost sight of their
human purpose. They may be defeating the very ends they were meant to
serve. We cling to constitutions out of "loyalty." We trudge in the
treadmill and call it love of our ancient institutions. We emulate the
mule, that greatest of all routineers.

CHAPTER II

THE TABOO

Our government has certainly not measured up to expectations. Even
chronic admirers of the "balance" and "symmetry" of the Constitution
admit either by word or deed that it did not foresee the whole history of
the American people. Poor bewildered statesmen, unused to any notion of
change, have seen the national life grow to a monstrous confusion and
sprout monstrous evils by the way. Men and women clamored for remedies,
vowed, shouted and insisted that their "official servants" do
something--something statesmanlike--to abate so much evident wrong. But
their representatives had very little more than a frock coat and a slogan
as equipment for the task. Trained to interpret a constitution instead of
life, these statesmen faced with historic helplessness the vociferations
of ministers, muckrakers, labor leaders, women's clubs, granges and
reformers' leagues. Out of a tumultuous medley appeared the common theme
of public opinion--that the leaders should lead, that the governors
should govern.

The trusts had appeared, labor was restless, vice seemed to be corrupting
the vitality of the nation. Statesmen had to do something. Their training
was legal and therefore utterly inadequate, but it was all they had. They
became panicky and reverted to an ancient superstition. They forbade the
existence of evil by law. They made it anathema. They pronounced it
damnable. They threatened to club it. They issued a legislative curse,
and called upon the district attorney to do the rest. They started out to
abolish human instincts, check economic tendencies and repress social
changes by laws prohibiting them. They turned to this sanctified
ignorance which is rampant in almost any nursery, which presides at
family councils, flourishes among "reformers"; which from time immemorial
has haunted legislatures and courts. Under the spell of it men try to
stop drunkenness by closing the saloons; when poolrooms shock them they
call a policeman; if Haywood becomes annoying, they procure an
injunction. They meet the evils of dance halls by barricading them; they
go forth to battle against vice by raiding brothels and fining
prostitutes. For trusts there is a Sherman Act. In spite of all
experience they cling desperately to these superstitions.

It is the method of the taboo, as naïve as barbarism, as ancient as human
failure.

There is a law against suicide. It is illegal for a man to kill himself.
What it means in practice, of course, is that there is punishment waiting
for a man who doesn't succeed in killing himself. We say to the man who
is tired of life that if he bungles we propose to make this world still
less attractive by clapping him into jail. I know an economist who has a
scheme for keeping down the population by refusing very poor people a
marriage license. He used to teach Sunday school and deplore promiscuity.
In the annual report of the president of a distilling company I once saw
the statement that business had increased in the "dry" states. In a
prohibition town where I lived you could drink all you wanted by
belonging to a "club" or winking at the druggist. And in another city
where Sunday closing was strictly enforced, a minister told me with
painful surprise that the Monday police blotter showed less drunks and
more wife-beaters.

We pass a law against race-track gambling and add to the profits from
faro. We raid the faro joints, and drive gambling into the home, where
poker and bridge whist are taught to children who follow their parents'
example. We deprive anarchists of free speech by the heavy hand of a
police magistrate, and furnish them with a practical instead of a
theoretical argument against government. We answer strikes with bayonets,
and make treason one of the rights of man.

Everybody knows that when you close the dance halls you fill the parks.
Men who in their youth took part in "crusades" against the Tenderloin now
admit in a crestfallen way that they succeeded merely in sprinkling the
Tenderloin through the whole city. Over twenty years ago we formulated a
sweeping taboo against trusts. Those same twenty years mark the
centralization of industry.

The routineer in a panic turns to the taboo. Whatever does not fit into
his rigid little scheme of things must have its head chopped off. Now
human nature and the changing social forces it generates are the very
material which fit least well into most little schemes of things. A man
cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life
become useless. We employ our instruments and abandon them. But nothing
so simply true as that prevails in politics. When a government routine
conflicts with the nation's purposes--the statesman actually makes a
virtue of his loyalty to the routine. His practice is to ignore human
character and pay no attention to social forces. The shallow presumption
is that undomesticated impulses can be obliterated; that world-wide
economic inventions can be stamped out by jailing millionaires--and
acting in the spirit of Mr. Chesterton's man Fipps "who went mad and ran
about the country with an axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever
there were not the same number on both sides." The routineer is, of
course, the first to decry every radical proposal as "against human
nature." But the stand-pat mind has forfeited all right to speak for
human nature. It has devoted the centuries to torturing men's instincts,
stamping on them, passing laws against them, lifting its eyebrows at the
thought of them--doing everything but trying to understand them. The same
people who with daily insistence say that innovators ignore facts are in
the absurd predicament of trying to still human wants with petty taboos.
Social systems like ours, which do not even feed and house men and women,
which deny pleasure, cramp play, ban adventure, propose celibacy and
grind out monotony, are a clear confession of sterility in statesmanship.
And politics, however pretentiously rhetorical about ideals, is
irrelevant if the only method it knows is to ostracize the desires it
cannot manage.

Suppose that statesmen transferred their reverence from the precedents
and mistakes of their ancestors to the human material which they have set
out to govern. Suppose they looked mankind in the face and asked
themselves what was the result of answering evil with a prohibition. Such
an exercise would, I fear, involve a considerable strain on what
reformers call their moral sensibilities. For human nature is a rather
shocking affair if you come to it with ordinary romantic optimism.
Certainly the human nature that figures in most political thinking is a
wraith that never was--not even in the souls of politicians. "Idealism"
creates an abstraction and then shudders at a reality which does not
answer to it. Now statesmen who have set out to deal with actual life
must deal with actual people. They cannot afford an inclusive pessimism
about mankind. Let them have the consistency and good sense to cease
bothering about men if men's desires seem intrinsically evil. Moral
judgment about the ultimate quality of character is dangerous to a
politician. He is too constantly tempted to call a policeman when he
disapproves.

We must study our failures. Gambling and drink, for example, produce much
misery. But what reformers have to learn is that men don't gamble just
for the sake of violating the law. They do so because something within
them is satisfied by betting or drinking. To erect a ban doesn't stop the
want. It merely prevents its satisfaction. And since this desire for
stimulants or taking a chance at a prize is older and far more deeply
rooted in the nature of men than love of the Prohibition Party or
reverence for laws made at Albany, people will contrive to drink and
gamble in spite of the acts of a legislature.

A man may take liquor for a variety of reasons: he may be thirsty; or
depressed; or unusually happy; he may want the companionship of a saloon,
or he may hope to forget a scolding wife. Perhaps he needs a "bracer" in
a weary hunt for a job. Perhaps he has a terrible craving for alcohol. He
does not take a drink so that he may become an habitual drunkard, or be
locked up in jail, or get into a brawl, or lose his job, or go insane.
These are what he might call the unfortunate by-products of his desire.
If once he could find something which would do for him what liquor does,
without hurting him as liquor does, there would be no problem of drink.
Bernard Shaw says he has found that substitute in going to church when
there's no service. Goethe wrote "The Sorrows of Werther" in order to get
rid of his own. Many an unhappy lover has found peace by expressing his
misery in sonnet form. The problem is to find something for the common
man who is not interested in contemporary churches and who can't write
sonnets.

When the socialists in Milwaukee began to experiment with municipal
dances they were greeted with indignant protests from the "anti-vice"
element and with amused contempt by the newspaper paragraphers. The
dances were discontinued, and so the belief in their failure is complete.
I think, though, that Mayor Seidel's defense would by itself make this
experiment memorable. He admitted freely the worst that can be said
against the ordinary dance hall. So far he was with the petty reformers.
Then he pointed out with considerable vehemence that dance halls were an
urgent social necessity. At that point he had transcended the mind of the
petty reformer completely. "We propose," said Seidel, "to go into
competition with the devil."

Nothing deeper has come from an American mayor in a long, long time. It
is the point that Jane Addams makes in the opening pages of that wisely
sweet book, "The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets." She calls
attention to the fact that the modern state has failed to provide for
pleasure. "This stupid experiment," she writes, "of organizing work and
failing to organize play has, of course, brought about a fine revenge.
The love of pleasure will not be denied, and when it has turned into all
sorts of malignant and vicious appetites, then we, the middle-aged, grow
quite distracted and resort to all sorts of restrictive measures."

For human nature seems to have wants that must be filled. If nobody else
supplies them, the devil will. The demand for pleasure, adventure,
romance has been left to the devil's catering for so long a time that
most people think he inspires the demand. He doesn't. Our neglect is the
devil's opportunity. What we should use, we let him abuse, and the
corruption of the best things, as Hume remarked, produces the worst.
Pleasure in our cities has become tied to lobster palaces, adventure to
exalted murderers, romance to silly, mooning novels. Like the flower girl
in Galsworthy's play, we have made a very considerable confusion of the
life of joy and the joy of life. The first impulse is to abolish all
lobster palaces, melodramas, yellow newspapers, and sentimentally erotic
novels. Why not abolish all the devil's works? the reformer wonders. The
answer is in history. It can't be done that way. It is impossible to
abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men. It is dangerous,
explosively dangerous, to thwart them for any length of time. The
Puritans tried to choke the craving for pleasure in early New England.
They had no theaters, no dances, no festivals. They burned witches
instead.

We rail a good deal against Tammany Hall. Reform tickets make periodic
sallies against it, crying economy, efficiency, and a business
administration. And we all pretend to be enormously surprised when the
"ignorant foreign vote" prefers a corrupt political ring to a party of
well-dressed, grammatical, and high-minded gentlemen. Some of us are even
rather downcast about democracy because the Bowery doesn't take to heart
the admonitions of the Evening Post.

We forget completely the important wants supplied by Tammany Hall. We
forget that this is a lonely country for an immigrant and that the Statue
of Liberty doesn't shed her light with too much warmth. Possessing
nothing but a statistical, inhuman conception of government, the average
municipal reformer looks down contemptuously upon a man like Tim Sullivan
with his clambakes and his dances; his warm and friendly saloons, his
handshaking and funeral-going and baby-christening; his readiness to get
coal for the family, and a job for the husband. But a Tim Sullivan is
closer to the heart of statesmanship than five City Clubs full of people
who want low taxes and orderly bookkeeping. He does things which have to
be done. He humanizes a strange country; he is a friend at court; he
represents the legitimate kindliness of government, standing between the
poor and the impersonal, uninviting majesty of the law. Let no man wonder
that Lorimer's people do not prefer an efficiency expert, that a Tim
Sullivan has power, or that men are loyal to Hinky Dink. The cry raised
against these men by the average reformer is a piece of cold, unreal,
preposterous idealism compared to the solid warm facts of kindliness,
clothes, food and fun.

You cannot beat the bosses with the reformer's taboo. You will not get
far on the Bowery with the cost unit system and low taxes. And I don't
blame the Bowery. You can beat Tammany Hall permanently in one way--by
making the government of a city as human, as kindly, as jolly as Tammany
Hall. I am aware of the contract-grafts, the franchise-steals, the dirty
streets, the bribing and the blackmail, the vice-and-crime partnerships,
the Big Business alliances of Tammany Hall. And yet it seems to me that
Tammany has a better perception of human need, and comes nearer to being
what a government should be, than any scheme yet proposed by a group of
"uptown good government" enthusiasts. Tammany is not a satanic instrument
of deception, cleverly devised to thwart "the will of the people." It is
a crude and largely unconscious answer to certain immediate needs, and
without those needs its power would crumble. That is why I ventured in
the preceding chapter to describe it as a natural sovereignty which had
grown up behind a mechanical form of government. It is a poor weed
compared to what government might be. But it is a real government that
has power and serves a want, and not a frame imposed upon men from on
top.

The taboo--the merely negative law--is the emptiest of all the
impositions from on top. In its long record of failure, in the
comparative success of Tammany, those who are aiming at social changes
can see a profound lesson; the impulses, cravings and wants of men must
be employed. You can employ them well or ill, but you must employ them. A
group of reformers lounging at a club cannot, dare not, decide to close
up another man's club because it is called a saloon. Unless the reformer
can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive
vices, he will fail. He will fail because human nature abhors the vacuum
created by the taboo.

An incident in the international peace propaganda illuminates this point.
Not long ago a meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York, to forward peace among
nations broke up in great disorder. Thousands of people who hate the
waste and futility of war as much as any of the orators of that evening
were filled with an unholy glee. They chuckled with delight at the idea
of a riot in a peace meeting. Though it would have seemed perverse to the
ordinary pacificist, this sentiment sprang from a respectable source. It
had the same ground as the instinctive feeling of nine men in ten that
Roosevelt has more right to talk about peace than William Howard Taft.
James made it articulate in his essay on "The Moral Equivalent of War."
James was a great advocate of peace, but he understood Theodore Roosevelt
and he spoke for the military man when he wrote of war that: "Its
'horrors' are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative
supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and
zo-ophily, of 'consumers' leagues' and 'associated charities,' of
industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness,
no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!"

And he added: "So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no
healthy minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking
of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and
human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks
or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a
type of military character which everyone feels that the race should
never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority."

So William James proposed not the abolition of war, but a moral
equivalent for it. He dreamed of "a conscription of the whole youthful
population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army
enlisted against _Nature_.... The military ideals of hardihood and
discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the people; no one
would remain blind, as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's
relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard
foundations of his higher life." Now we are not concerned here over the
question of this particular proposal. The telling point in my opinion is
this: that when a wise man, a student of human nature, and a reformer met
in the same person, the taboo was abandoned. James has given us a lasting
phrase when he speaks of the "moral equivalent" of evil. We can use it, I
believe, as a guide post to statesmanship. Rightly understood, the idea
behind the words contains all that is valuable in conservatism, and, for
the first time, gives a reputable meaning to that tortured epithet
"constructive."

"The military feelings," says James, "are too deeply grounded to abdicate
their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered ...
such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have
required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in
the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military
party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace.... So far, war has been
the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an
equivalent discipline is organized I believe that war must have its way.
But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social
man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing
such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as
effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time,
of skilful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic
opportunities. The martial type of character can be bred without war."

To find for evil its moral equivalent is to be conservative about values
and radical about forms, to turn to the establishment of positively good
things instead of trying simply to check bad ones, to emphasize the
additions to life, instead of the restrictions upon it, to substitute, if
you like, the love of heaven for the fear of hell. Such a program means
the dignified utilization of the whole nature of man. It will recognize
as the first test of all political systems and moral codes whether or not
they are "against human nature." It will insist that they be cut to fit
the whole man, not merely a part of him. For there are utopian proposals
made every day which cover about as much of a human being as a beautiful
hat does.

Instead of tabooing our impulses, we must redirect them. Instead of
trying to crush badness we must turn the power behind it to good account.
The assumption is that every lust is capable of some civilized
expression.

We say, in effect, that evil is a way by which desire expresses itself.
The older moralists, the taboo philosophers believed that the desires
themselves were inherently evil. To us they are the energies of the soul,
neither good nor bad in themselves. Like dynamite, they are capable of
all sorts of uses, and it is the business of civilization, through the
family and the school, religion, art, science, and all institutions, to
transmute these energies into fine values. Behind evil there is power,
and it is folly,--wasting and disappointing folly,--to ignore this power
because it has found an evil issue. All that is dynamic in human
character is in these rooted lusts. The great error of the taboo has been
just this: that it believed each desire had only one expression, that if
that expression was evil the desire itself was evil. We know a little
better to-day. We know that it is possible to harness desire to many
interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.

This supplies us with a standard for judging reforms, and so makes clear
what "constructive" action really is. When it was discovered recently
that the boys' gang was not an unmitigated nuisance to be chased by a
policeman, but a force that could be made valuable to civilization
through the Boy Scouts, a really constructive reform was given to the
world. The effervescence of boys on the street, wasted and perverted
through neglect or persecution, was drained and applied to fine uses.
When Percy MacKaye pleads for pageants in which the people themselves
participate, he offers an opportunity for expressing some of the lusts of
the city in the form of an art. The Freudian school of psychologists
calls this "sublimation." They have brought forward a wealth of material
which gives us every reason to believe that the theory of "moral
equivalents" is soundly based, that much the same energies produce crime
and civilization, art, vice, insanity, love, lust, and religion. In each
individual the original differences are small. Training and opportunity
decide in the main how men's lust shall emerge. Left to themselves, or
ignorantly tabooed, they break forth in some barbaric or morbid form.
Only by supplying our passions with civilized interests can we escape
their destructive force.

I have put it negatively, as a counsel of prudence. But he who has the
courage of existence will put it triumphantly, crying "yea" as Nietzsche
did, and recognizing that all the passions of men are the motive powers
of a fine life.

For the roads that lead to heaven and hell are one until they part.

THE CHANGING FOCUS

The taboo, however useless, is at least concrete. Although it achieves
little besides mischief, it has all the appearance of practical action,
and consequently enlists the enthusiasm of those people whom Wells
describes as rushing about the country shouting: "For Gawd's sake let's
_do_ something _now_." There are weight and solidity in a policeman's
club, while a "moral equivalent" happens to be pale like the stuff of
which dreams are made. To the politician whose daily life consists in
dodging the thousand and one conflicting prejudices of his constituents,
in bickering with committees, intriguing and playing for the vote; to the
business man harassed on four sides by the trust, the union, the law, and
public opinion,--distrustful of any wide scheme because the stupidity of
his shipping clerk is the most vivid item in his mind, all this
discussion about politics and the inner life will sound like so much
fine-spun nonsense.

I, for one, am not disposed to blame the politicians and the business
men. They govern the nation, it is true, but they do it in a rather
absentminded fashion. Those revolutionists who see the misery of the
country as a deliberate and fiendish plot overestimate the bad will, the
intelligence and the singleness of purpose in the ruling classes.
Business and political leaders don't mean badly; the trouble with them is
that most of the time they don't mean anything. They picture themselves
as very "practical," which in practice amounts to saying that nothing
makes them feel so spiritually homeless as the discussion of values and
an invitation to examine first principles. Ideas, most of the time, cause
them genuine distress, and are as disconcerting as an idle office boy, or
a squeaky telephone.

I do not underestimate the troubles of the man of affairs. I have lived
with politicians,--with socialist politicians whose good-will was
abundant and intentions constructive. The petty vexations pile up into
mountains; the distracting details scatter the attention and break up
thinking, while the mere problem of exercising power crowds out
speculation about what to do with it. Personal jealousies interrupt
co-ordinated effort; committee sessions wear out nerves by their aimless
drifting; constant speech-making turns a man back upon a convenient
little store of platitudes--misunderstanding and distortion dry up the
imagination, make thought timid and expression flat, the atmosphere of
publicity requires a mask which soon becomes the reality. Politicians
tend to live "in character," and many a public figure has come to imitate
the journalism which describes him. You cannot blame politicians if their
perceptions are few and their thinking crude.

Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to
expect solutions in a political campaign. Woodrow Wilson brought to
public life an exceedingly flexible mind,--many of us when he first
emerged rejoiced at the clean and athletic quality of his thinking. But
even he under the stress of a campaign slackened into commonplace
reiteration, accepting a futile and intellectually dishonest platform,
closing his eyes to facts, misrepresenting his opponents, abandoning, in
short, the very qualities which distinguished him. It is understandable.
When a National Committee puts a megaphone to a man's mouth and tells him
to yell, it is difficult for him to hear anything.

If a nation's destiny were really bound up with the politics reported in
newspapers, the impasse would be discouraging. If the important
sovereignty of a country were in what is called its parliamentary life,
then the day of Plato's philosopher-kings would be far off indeed.
Certainly nobody expects our politicians to become philosophers. When
they do they hide the fact. And when philosophers try to be politicians
they generally cease to be philosophers. But the truth is that we
overestimate enormously the importance of nominations, campaigns, and
office-holding. If we are discouraged it is because we tend to identify
statecraft with that official government which is merely one of its
instruments. Vastly over-advertised, we have mistaken an inflated fragment
for the real political life of the country.

For if you think of men and their welfare, government appears at once as
nothing but an agent among many others. The task of civilizing our
impulses by creating fine opportunities for their expression cannot be
accomplished through the City Hall alone. All the influences of social
life are needed. The eggs do not lie in one basket. Thus the issues in
the trade unions may be far more directly important to statecraft than
the destiny of the Republican Party. The power that workingmen generate
when they unite--the demands they will make and the tactics they will
pursue--how they are educating themselves and the nation--these are
genuine issues which bear upon the future. So with the policies of
business men. Whether financiers are to be sullen and stupid like
Archbold, defiant like Morgan, or well-intentioned like Perkins is a
question that enters deeply into the industrial issues. The whole
business problem takes on a new complexion if the representatives of
capital are to be men with the temper of Louis Brandeis or William C.
Redfield. For when business careers are made professional, new motives
enter into the situation; it will make a world of difference if the
leadership of industry is in the hands of men interested in production as
a creative art instead of as a brute exploitation. The economic conflicts
are at once raised to a plane of research, experiment and honest
deliberation. For on the level of hate and mean-seeking no solution is
possible. That subtle fact,--the change of business motives, the
demonstration that industry can be conducted as medicine is,--may
civilize the whole class conflict.

Obviously statecraft is concerned with such a change, extra-political
though it is. And wherever the politician through his prestige or the
government through its universities can stimulate a revolution in
business motives, it should do so. That is genuinely constructive work,
and will do more to a humane solution of the class struggle than all the
jails and state constabularies that ever betrayed the barbarism of the
Twentieth Century. It is no wonder that business is such a sordid affair.
We have done our best to exclude from it every passionate interest that
is capable of lighting up activity with eagerness and joy.
"Unbusinesslike" we have called the devotion of craftsmen and scientists.
We have actually pretended that the work of extracting a living from
nature could be done most successfully by short-sighted money-makers
encouraged by their money-spending wives. We are learning better to-day.
We are beginning to know that this nation for all its boasts has not
touched the real possibilities of business success, that nature and good
luck have done most of our work, that our achievements come in spite of
our ignorance. And so no man can gauge the civilizing possibilities of a
new set of motives in business. That it will add to the dignity and value
of millions of careers is only one of its blessings. Given a nation of
men trained to think scientifically about their work and feel about it as
craftsmen, and you have a people released from a stupid fixation upon the
silly little ideals of accumulating dollars and filling their neighbor's
eye. We preach against commercialism but without great result. And the
reason for our failure is: that we merely say "you ought not" instead of
offering a new interest. Instead of telling business men not to be
greedy, we should tell them to be industrial statesmen, applied
scientists, and members of a craft. Politics can aid that revolution in a
hundred Ways: by advocating it, by furnishing schools that teach,
laboratories that demonstrate, by putting business on the same plane of
interest as the Health Service.

The indictment against politics to-day is not its corruption, but its
lack of insight. I believe it is a fact which experience will sustain
that men steal because they haven't anything better to do. You don't have
to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. Let a human being throw
the energies of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct
of workmanship will take care of his honesty. The writers who have
nothing to say are the ones that you can buy: the others have too high a
price. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate his product: the reason
isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he
couldn't. I suggested in an earlier chapter that the issue of honesty and
dishonesty was a futile one, and I placed faith in the creative men. They
hate shams and the watering of goods on a more trustworthy basis than the
mere routine moralist. To them dishonesty is a contradiction of their own
lusts, and they ask no credit, need none, for being true. Creation is an
emotional ascent, which makes the standard vices trivial, and turns all
that is valuable in virtue to the service of desire.

When politics revolves mechanically it ceases to use the real energies of
a nation. Government is then at once irrelevant and mischievous--a mere
obstructive nuisance. Not long ago a prominent senator remarked that he
didn't know much about the country, because he had spent the last few
months in Washington. It was a profound utterance as anyone can testify
who reads, let us say, the Congressional Record. For that document,
though replete with language, is singularly unacquainted with the forces
that agitate the nation. Politics, as the contributors to the
Congressional Record seem to understand it, is a very limited selection
of well-worn debates on a few arbitrarily chosen "problems." Those
questions have developed a technique and an interest in them for their
own sake. They are handled with a dull solemnity quite out of proportion
to their real interest. Labor receives only a perfunctory and largely
disingenuous attention; even commerce is handled in a way that expresses
neither its direction nor its public use. Congress has been ready enough
to grant favors to corporations, but where in its wrangling from the
Sherman Act to the Commerce Court has it shown any sympathetic
understanding of the constructive purposes in the trust movement? It has
either presented the business man with money or harassed him with
bungling enthusiasm in the pretended interests of the consumer. The one
thing Congress has not done is to use the talents of business men for the
nation's advantage.

If "politics" has been indifferent to forces like the union and the
trust, it is no exaggeration to say that it has displayed a modest
ignorance of women's problems, of educational conflicts and racial
aspirations; of the control of newspapers and magazines, the book
publishing world, socialist conventions and unofficial political groups
like the single-taxers.

Such genuine powers do not absorb our political interest because we are
fooled by the regalia of office. But statesmanship, if it is to be
relevant, would obtain a new perspective on these dynamic currents, would
find out the wants they express and the energies they contain, would
shape and direct and guide them. For unions and trusts, sects, clubs and
voluntary associations stand for actual needs. The size of their
following, the intensity of their demands are a fair index of what the
statesman must think about. No lawyer created a trust though he drew up
its charter; no logician made the labor movement or the feminist
agitation. If you ask what for political purposes a nation is, a
practical answer would be: it is its "movements." They are the social
_life_. So far as the future is man-made it is made of them. They show
their real vitality by a relentless growth in spite of all the little
fences and obstacles that foolish politicians devise.

There is, of course, much that is dead within the movements. Each one
carries along a quantity of inert and outworn ideas,--not infrequently
there is an internally contradictory current. Thus the very workingmen
who agitate for a better diffusion of wealth display a marked hostility
to improvements in the production of it. The feminists too have their
atavisms: not a few who object to the patriarchal family seem inclined to
cure it by going back still more--to the matriarchal. Constructive
business has no end of reactionary moments----the most striking, perhaps,
is when it buys up patents in order to suppress them. Yet these
inversions, though discouraging, are not essential in the life of
movements. They need to be expurgated by an unceasing criticism; yet in
bulk the forces I have mentioned, and many others less important, carry
with them the creative powers of our times.

It is not surprising that so many political inventions have been made
within these movements, fostered by them, and brought to a general public
notice through their efforts. When some constructive proposal is being
agitated before a legislative committee, it is customary to unite the
"movements" in support of it. Trade unions and women's clubs have joined
hands in many an agitation. There are proposals to-day, like the minimum
wage, which seem sure of support from consumers' leagues, women's
federations, trade unions and those far-sighted business men who may be
called "State Socialists."

In fact, unless a political invention is woven into a social movement it
has no importance. Only when that is done is it imbued with life. But how
among countless suggestions is a "cause" to know the difference between a
true invention and a pipe-dream? There is, of course, no infallible
touchstone by which we can tell offhand. No one need hope for an easy
certainty either here or anywhere else in human affairs. No one is
absolved from experiment and constant revision. Yet there are some
hypotheses that prima facie deserve more attention than others.

Those are the suggestions which come out of a recognized human need. If a
man proposed that the judges of the Supreme Court be reduced from nine to
seven because the number seven has mystical power, we could ignore him.
But if he suggested that the number be reduced because seven men can
deliberate more effectively than nine he ought to be given a hearing. Or
let us suppose that the argument is about granting votes to women. The
suffragist who bases a claim on the so-called "logic of democracy" is
making the poorest possible showing for a good cause. I have heard people
maintain that: "it makes no difference whether women want the ballot, or
are fit for it, or can do any good with it,--this country is a democracy.
Democracy means government by the votes of the people. Women are people.
Therefore women should vote." That in a very simple form is the
mechanical conception of government. For notice how it ignores human
wants and human powers--how it subordinates people to a rigid formula. I
use this crude example because it shows that even the most genuine and
deeply grounded demands are as yet unable to free themselves entirely
from a superficial manner of thinking. We are only partially emancipated
from the mechanical and merely logical tradition of the Eighteenth
Century. No end of illustrations could be adduced. In the Socialist party
it has been the custom to denounce the "short ballot." Why? Because it
reduces the number of elective offices. This is regarded as undemocratic
for the reason that democracy has come to mean a series of elections.
According to a logic, the more elections the more democratic. But
experience has shown that a seven-foot ballot with a regiment of names is
so bewildering that a real choice is impossible. So it is proposed to cut
down the number of elective offices, focus the attention on a few
alternatives, and turn voting into a fairly intelligent performance. Here
is an attempt to fit political devices to the actual powers of the voter.
The old, crude form of ballot forgot that finite beings had to operate
it. But the "democrats" adhere to the multitude of choices because
"logic" requires them to.

This incident of the "short ballot" illustrates the cleavage between
invention and routine. The socialists oppose it not because their
intentions are bad but because on this issue their thinking is
mechanical. Instead of applying the test of human need, they apply a
verbal and logical consistency. The "short ballot" in itself is a slight
affair, but the insight behind it seems to me capable of revolutionary
development. It is one symptom of the effort to found institutions on
human nature. There are many others. We might point to the first
experiments aimed at remedying the helter-skelter of careers by
vocational guidance. Carried through successfully, this invention of
Prof. Parsons' is one whose significance in happiness can hardly be
exaggerated. When you think of the misfits among your acquaintances--the
lawyers who should be mechanics, the doctors who should be business men,
the teachers who should have been clerks, and the executives who should
be doing research in a laboratory--when you think of the talent that
would be released by proper use, the imagination takes wing at the
possibilities. What could we not make of the world if we employed its
genius!

Whoever is working to express special energies is part of a constructive
revolution. Whoever is removing the stunting environments of our
occupations is doing the fundamentals of reform. The studies of Miss
Goldmark of industrial fatigue, recuperative power and maximum
productivity are contributions toward that distant and desirable period
when labor shall be a free and joyous activity. Every suggestion which
turns work from a drudgery to a craft is worth our deepest interest. For
until then the labor problem will never be solved. The socialist demand
for a better distribution of wealth is of great consequence, but without
a change in the very nature of labor society will not have achieved the
happiness it expects. That is why imaginative socialists have shown so
great an interest in "syndicalism." There at least in some of its forms,
we can catch sight of a desire to make all labor a self-governing craft.

The handling of crime has been touched by the modern impetus. The
ancient, abstract and wholesale "justice" is breaking up into detailed
and carefully adapted treatment of individual offenders. What this means
for the child has become common knowledge in late years. Criminology (to
use an awkward word) is finding a human center. So is education. Everyone
knows how child study is revolutionizing the school room and the
curriculum. Why, it seems that Mme. Montessori has had the audacity to
sacrifice the sacred bench to the interests of the pupil! The traditional
school seems to be vanishing--that place in which an ill-assorted band of
youngsters was for a certain number of hours each day placed in the
vicinity of a text-book and a maiden lady.

I mention these experiments at random. It is not the specific reforms
that I wish to emphasize but the great possibilities they foreshadow.
Whether or not we adopt certain special bills, high tariff or low tariff,
one banking system or another, this trust control or that, is a slight
gain compared to a change of attitude toward all political problems. The
reformer bound up in his special propaganda will, of course, object that
"to get something done is worth more than any amount of talk about new
ways of looking at political problems." What matters the method, he will
cry, provided the reform be good? Well, the method matters more than any
particular reform. A man who couldn't think straight might get the right
answer to one problem, but how much faith would you have in his capacity
to solve the next one? If you wanted to educate a child, would you teach
him to read one play of Shakespeare, or would you teach him to _read_? If
the world were going to remain frigidly set after next year, we might
well thank our stars if we blundered into a few decent solutions right
away. But as there is no prospect of a time when our life will be
immutably fixed, as we shall, therefore, have to go on inventing, it is
fair to say that what the world is aching for is not a special reform
embodied in a particular statute, but a way of going at all problems. The
lasting value of Darwin, for example, is not in any concrete conclusion
he reached. His importance to the world lies in the new twist he gave to
science. He lent it fruitful direction, a different impetus, and the
results are beyond his imagining.

In that spiritual autobiography of a searching mind, "The New
Machiavelli," Wells describes his progress from a reformer of concrete
abuses to a revolutionist in method. "You see," he says, "I began in my
teens by wanting to plan and build cities and harbors for mankind; I
ended in the middle thirties by desiring only to serve and increase a
general process of thought, a process fearless, critical, real-spirited,
that would in its own time give cities, harbors, air, happiness,
everything at a scale and quality and in a light altogether beyond the
match-striking imaginations of a contemporary mind...."

This same veering of interest may be seen in the career of another
Englishman. I refer to Mr. Graham Wallas. Back in the '80's he was
working with the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, Sidney Olivier, Annie Besant and
others in socialist propaganda. Readers of the Fabian Essays know Mr.
Wallas and appreciate the work of his group. Perhaps more than anyone
else, the Fabians are responsible for turning English socialist thought
from the verbalism of the Marxian disciples to the actualities of English
political life. Their appetite for the concrete was enormous; their
knowledge of facts overpowering, as the tomes produced by Mr. and Mrs.
Webb can testify. The socialism of the Fabians soon became a definite
legislative program which the various political parties were to be
bulldozed, cajoled and tricked into enacting. It was effective work, and
few can question the value of it. Yet many admirers have been left with a
sense of inadequacy.

Unlike the orthodox socialists, the Fabians took an active part in
immediate politics. "We permeated the party organizations," writes Shaw,
"and pulled all the wires we could lay our hands on with our utmost
adroitness and energy.... The generalship of this movement was undertaken
chiefly by Sidney Webb, who played such bewildering conjuring tricks with
the Liberal thimbles and the Fabian peas that to this day both the
Liberals and the sectarian Socialists stand aghast at him." Few Americans
know how great has been this influence on English political history for
the last twenty years. The well-known Minority Report of the Poor Law
Commission bears the Webb signature most conspicuously. Fabianism began
to achieve a reputation for getting things done--for taking part in
"practical affairs." Bernard Shaw has found time to do no end of
campaigning and even the parochial politics of a vestryman has not seemed
too insignificant for his Fabian enthusiasm. Graham Wallas was a
candidate in five municipal elections, and has held an important office
as member of the London County Council.

But the original Fabian enthusiasm has slackened. One might ascribe it to
a growing sense that concrete programs by themselves will not insure any
profound regeneration of society. H. G. Wells has been savage and often
unfair about the Fabian Society, but in "The New Machiavelli" he touched,
I believe, the real disillusionment. Remington's history is in a way
symbolic. Here was a successful political reformer, coming more and more
to a disturbing recognition of his helplessness, perceiving the
aimlessness and the unreality of political life, and announcing his
contempt for the "crudification" of all issues. What Remington missed was
what so many reformers are beginning to miss--an underlying philosophical
habit.

Mr. Wallas seems to have had much the same experience. In the midst of a
bustle of activity, politics appeared to have no center to which its
thinking and doing could be referred. The truth was driven home upon him
that political science is a science of human relationship with the human
beings left out. So he writes that "the thinkers of the past, from Plato
to Bentham and Mill, had each his own view of human nature, and they made
these views the basis of their speculations on government." But to-day
"nearly all students of politics analyze institutions and avoid the
analysis of man." Whoever has read the typical book on politics by a
professor or a reformer will agree, I think, when he adds: "One feels
that many of the more systematic books on politics by American University
professors are useless, just because the writers dealt with abstract men,
formed on assumptions of which they were unaware and which they have
never tested either by experience or by study."

An extreme example could be made of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of
Columbia University. In the space of six months he wrote an impassioned
defense of "constitutional government," beginning with the question, "Why
is it that in the United States the words politics and politician have
associations that are chiefly of evil omen," and then, to make irony
complete, proceeded at the New York State Republican Convention to do the
jobbery of Boss Barnes. What is there left but to gasp and wonder whether
the words of the intellect have anything to do with the facts of life?
What insight into reality can a man possess who is capable of discussing
politics and ignoring politicians? What kind of naïveté was it that led
this educator into asking such a question?

President Butler is, I grant, a caricature of the typical professor. Yet
what shall we say of the annual harvest of treatises on "labor problems"
which make no analysis of the mental condition of laboring men; of the
treatises on marriage and prostitution which gloss over the sexual life
of the individual? "In the other sciences which deal with human affairs,"
writes Mr. Wallas, referring to pedagogy and criminology, "this division
between the study of the thing done and the study of the being who does
it is not found."

I have in my hands a text-book of six hundred pages which is used in the
largest universities as a groundwork of political economy. This
remarkable sentence strikes the eye: "The motives to business activity
are too familiar to require analysis." But some sense that perhaps the
"economic man" is not a self-evident creature seems to have touched our
author. So we are treated to these sapient remarks: "To avoid this
criticism we will begin with a characterization of the typical business
man to be found to-day in the United States and other countries in the
same stage of industrial development. _He has four traits which show
themselves more or less clearly in all of his acts._" They are first
"self-interest," but "this does not mean that he is steeped in
selfishness ..."; secondly, "the larger self," the family, union, club,
and "in times of emergency his country"; thirdly, "love of independence,"
for "his ambition is to stand on his own feet"; fourthly, "business
ethics" which "are not usually as high as the standards professed in
churches, but they are much higher than current criticisms of business
would lead one to think." Three-quarters of a page is sufficient for this
penetrating analysis of motive and is followed by the remark that "these
four characteristics of the economic man are readily explained by
reference to the evolutionary process which has brought industrial
society to its present stage of development."

If those were the generalizations of a tired business man after a heavy
dinner and a big cigar, they would still seem rather muddled and useless.
But as the basis of an economic treatise in which "laws" are announced,
"principles" laid down, reforms criticized as "impracticable," all for
the benefit of thousands of college students, it is hardly possible to
exaggerate the folly of such an exhibition. I have taken a book written
by one eminent professor and evidently approved by others, for they use
it as a text-book. It is no queer freak. I myself was supposed to read
that book pretty nearly every week for a year. With hundreds of others I
was supposed to found my economic understanding upon it. We were actually
punished for not reading that book. It was given to us as wisdom, as
modern political economy.

But what goes by the name to-day is a potpourri in which one can
distinguish descriptions of legal forms, charters and institutions;
comparative studies of governmental and social machinery; the history of
institutions, a few "principles" like the law of rent, some moral
admonitions, a good deal of class feeling, not a little timidity--but
almost no attempt to cut beneath these manifestations of social life to
the creative impulses which produce them. The Economic Man--that lazy
abstraction--is still paraded in the lecture room; the study of human
nature has not advanced beyond the gossip of old wives.

Graham Wallas touched the cause of the trouble when he pointed out that
political science to-day discusses institutions and ignores the nature of
the men who make and live under them. I have heard professors reply that
it wasn't their business to discuss human nature but to record and
interpret economic and political facts. Yet if you probe those
"interpretations" there is no escaping the conclusion that they rest upon
some notion of what man is like. "The student of politics," writes Mr.
Wallas, "must, consciously or unconsciously, form a conception of human
nature, and the less conscious he is of his conception the more likely he
is to be dominated by it." For politics is an interest of men--a tool
which they fabricate and use--and no comment has much value if it tries
to get along without mankind. You might as well try to describe food by
ignoring the digestion.

Mr. Wallas has called a halt. I think we may say that his is the
distinction of having turned the study of politics back to the humane
tradition of Plato and Machiavelli--of having made man the center of
political investigation. The very title of his book--"Human Nature in
Politics"--is significant. Now in making that statement, I am aware that
it is a sweeping one, and I do not mean to imply that Mr. Wallas is the
only modern man who has tried to think about politics psychologically.
Here in America alone we have two splendid critics, a man and a woman,
whose thought flows from an interpretation of human character. Thorstein
Veblen's brilliant descriptions penetrate deeply into our mental life,
and Jane Addams has given new hope to many of us by her capacity for
making ideals the goal of natural desire.

Nor is it just to pass by such a suggestive thinker as Gabriel Tarde,
even though we may feel that his psychology is too simple and his
conclusions somewhat overdriven by a favorite theory. The work of Gustav
Le Bon on "crowds" has, of course, passed into current thought, but I
doubt whether anyone could say that he had even prepared a basis for a
new political psychology. His own aversion to reform, his fondness for
vast epochs and his contempt for current effort have left most of his
"psychological laws" in the region of interesting literary comment. There
are, too, any number of "social psychologies," such as those of Ross and
McDougall. But the trouble with them is that the "psychology" is weak and
uninformed, distorted by moral enthusiasms, and put out without any
particular reference to the task of statesmanship. When you come to
special problems, the literature of the subject picks up. Crime is
receiving valuable attention, education is profoundly affected,
alcoholism and sex have been handled for a good while on a psychological
basis.

But it remained for Mr. Wallas to state the philosophy of the matter--to
say why the study of human nature must serve politics, and to point out
how. He has not produced a political psychology, but he has written the
manifesto for it. As a result, fragmentary investigations can be brought
together and applied to the work of statecraft. Merely by making these
researches self-conscious, he has made clearer their goal, given them
direction, and kindled them to practical action. How necessary this work
is can be seen in the writing of Miss Addams. Owing to keen insight and
fine sympathy her thinking has generally been on a human basis. Yet Miss
Addams is a reformer, and sympathy without an explicit philosophy may
lead to a distorted enthusiasm. Her book on prostitution seems rather the
product of her moral fervor than her human insight. Compare it with "The
Spirit of Youth" or "Newer Ideals of Peace" or "Democracy and Social
Ethics" and I think you will notice a very considerable willingness to
gloss over human need in the interests of an unanalyzed reform. To put it
bluntly, Miss Addams let her impatience get the better of her wisdom. She
had written brilliantly about sex and its "sublimation," she had
suggested notable "moral equivalents" for vice, but when she touched the
white slave traffic its horrors were so great that she also put her faith
in the policeman and the district attorney. "A New Conscience and an
Ancient Evil" is an hysterical book, just because the real philosophical
basis of Miss Addams' thinking was not deliberate enough to withstand the
shock of a poignant horror.

It is this weakness that Mr. Wallas comes to remedy. He has described
what political science must be like, and anyone who has absorbed his
insight has an intellectual groundwork for political observation. No one,
least of all Mr. Wallas, would claim anything like finality for the
essay. These labors are not done in a day. But he has deliberately
brought the study of politics to the only focus which has any rational
interest for mankind. He has made a plea, and sketched a plan which
hundreds of investigators the world over must help to realize. If
political science could travel in the direction suggested, its criticism
would be relevant, its proposals practical. There would, for the first
time, be a concerted effort to build a civilization around mankind, to
use its talent and to satisfy its needs. There would be no more empty
taboos, no erecting of institutions upon abstract and mechanical
analogies. Politics would be like education--an effort to develop, train
and nurture men's impulses. As Montessori is building the school around
the child, so politics would build all of social life around the human
being.

That practical issues hang upon these investigations can be shown by an
example from Mr. Wallas's book. Take the quarrel over socialism. You hear
it said that without the private ownership of capital people will lose
ambition and sink into sloth. Many men, just as well aware of present-day
evils as the socialists, are unwilling to accept the collectivist remedy.
G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc speak of the "magic of property" as
the real obstacle to socialism. Now obviously this is a question of
first-rate importance. If socialism will destroy initiative then only a
doctrinaire would desire it. But how is the question to be solved? You
cannot reason it out. Economics, as we know it to-day, is quite incapable
of answering such a problem, for it is a matter that depends upon
psychological investigation. When a professor says that socialism is
impracticable he begs the question, for that amounts to assuming that the
point at issue is already settled. If he tells you that socialism is
against human nature, we have a perfect right to ask where he proved the
possibilities of human nature.

But note how Mr. Wallas approaches the debate: "Children quarrel
furiously at a very early age over apparently worthless things, and
collect and hide them long before they can have any clear notion of the
advantages to be derived from individual possession. Those children who
in certain charity schools are brought up entirely without personal
property, even in their clothes or pocket handkerchiefs, show every sign
of the bad effect on health and character which results from complete
inability to satisfy a strong inherited instinct.... Some economist ought
therefore to give us a treatise in which this property instinct is
carefully and quantitatively examined.... How far can it be eliminated or
modified by education? Is it satisfied by a leasehold or a life-interest,
or by such an arrangement of corporate property as is offered by a
collegiate foundation, or by the provision of a public park? Does it
require for its satisfaction material and visible things such as land or
houses, or is the holding, say, of colonial railway shares sufficient? Is
the absence of unlimited proprietary rights felt more strongly in the
case of personal chattels (such as furniture and ornaments) than in the
case of land or machinery? Does the degree and direction of the instinct
markedly differ among different individuals or races, or between the two
sexes?"

This puts the argument upon a plane where discussion is relevant. This is
no trumped-up issue: it is asked by a politician and a socialist seeking
for a real solution. We need to know whether the "magic of property"
extends from a man's garden to Standard Oil stocks as anti-socialists
say, and, conversely, we need to know what is happening to that mass of
proletarians who own no property and cannot satisfy their instincts even
with personal chattels.

For if ownership is a human need, we certainly cannot taboo it as the
extreme communists so dogmatically urge. "Pending ... an inquiry," writes
Mr. Wallas, "my own provisional opinion is that, like a good many
instincts of very early evolutionary origin, it can be satisfied by an
avowed pretense; just as a kitten which is fed regularly on milk can be
kept in good health if it is allowed to indulge its hunting instinct by
playing with a bobbin, and a peaceful civil servant satisfies his
instinct of combat and adventure at golf."

Mr. Wallas takes exactly the same position as William James did when he
planned a "moral equivalent" for war. Both men illustrate the changing
focus of political thought. Both try to found statesmanship on human
need. Both see that there are good and bad satisfactions of the same
impulse. The routineer with his taboo does not see this, so he attempts
the impossible task of obliterating the impulse. He differs fundamentally
from the creative politician who devotes himself to inventing fine
expressions for human needs, who recognizes that the work of
statesmanship is in large measure the finding of good substitutes for the
bad things we want.

This is the heart of a political revolution. When we recognize that the
focus of politics is shifting from a mechanical to a human center we
shall have reached what is, I believe, the most essential idea in modern
politics. More than any other generalization it illuminates the currents
of our national life and explains the altering tasks of statesmanship.

The old effort was to harness mankind to abstract principles--liberty,
justice or equality--and to deduce institutions from these high-sounding
words. It did not succeed because human nature was contrary and restive.
The new effort proposes to fit creeds and institutions to the wants of
men, to satisfy their impulses as fully and beneficially as possible.

And yet we do not begin to know our desires or the art of their
satisfaction. Mr. Wallas's book and the special literature of the subject
leave no doubt that a precise political psychology is far off indeed. The
human nature we must put at the center of our statesmanship is only
partially understood. True, Mr. Wallas works with a psychology that is
fairly well superseded. But not even the advance-guard to-day, what we
may call the Freudian school, would claim that it had brought knowledge
to a point where politics could use it in any very deep or comprehensive
way. The subject is crude and fragmentary, though we are entitled to call
it promising.

Yet the fact had better be faced: psychology has not gone far enough, its
results are still too vague for our purposes. We know very little, and
what we know has hardly been applied to political problems. That the last
few years have witnessed a revolution in the study of mental life is
plain: the effects are felt not only in psychotherapy, but in education,
morals, religion, and no end of cultural interests. The impetus of Freud
is perhaps the greatest advance ever made towards the understanding and
control of human character. But for the complexities of politics it is
not yet ready. It will take time and endless labor for a detailed study
of social problems in the light of this growing knowledge.

What then shall we do now? Must we continue to muddle along in the old
ruts, gazing rapturously at an impotent ideal, until the works of the
scientists are matured?

CHAPTER IV

THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER

It would indeed be an intolerably pedantic performance for a nation to
sit still and wait for its scientists to report on their labors. The
notion is typical of the pitfalls in the path of any theorist who does
not correct his logic by a constant reference to the movement of life. It
is true that statecraft must make human nature its basis. It is true that
its chief task is the invention of forms and institutions which satisfy
the inner needs of mankind. And it is true that our knowledge of those
needs and the technique of their satisfaction is hazy, unorganized and
blundering.

But to suppose that the remedy lies in waiting for monographs from the
research of the laboratory is to have lost a sense of the rhythm of
actual affairs. That is not the way things come about: we grow into a new
point of view: only afterwards, in looking back, do we see the landmarks
of our progress. Thus it is customary to say that Adam Smith dates the
change from the old mercantilist economy to the capitalistic economics of
the nineteenth century. But that is a manner of speech. The old
mercantilist policy was giving way to early industrialism: a thousand
unconscious economic and social forces were compelling the change. Adam
Smith expressed the process, named it, idealized it and made it
self-conscious. Then because men were clearer about what they were doing,
they could in a measure direct their destiny.

That is but another way of saying that great revolutionary changes do not
spring full-armed from anybody's brow. A genius usually becomes the
luminous center of a nation's crisis,--men see better by the light of
him. His bias deflects their actions. Unquestionably the doctrine-driven
men who made the economics of the last century had much to do with the
halo which encircled the smutted head of industrialism. They put the
stamp of their genius on certain inhuman practices, and of course it has
been the part of the academic mind to imitate them ever since. The
orthodox economists are in the unenviable position of having taken their
morals from the exploiter and of having translated them into the
grandiloquent language of high public policy. They gave capitalism the
sanction of the intellect. When later, Carlyle and Ruskin battered the
economists into silence with invective and irony they were voicing the
dumb protest of the humane people of England. They helped to organize a
formless resentment by endowing it with intelligence and will.

So it is to-day. If this nation did not show an unmistakable tendency to
put men at the center of politics instead of machinery and things; if
there were not evidence to prove that we are turning from the sterile
taboo to the creation of finer environments; if the impetus for shaping
our destiny were not present in our politics and our life, then essays
like these would be so much baying at the moon, fantastic and unworthy
pleas for some irrelevant paradise. But the gropings are there,--vastly
confused in the tangled strains of the nation's interests. Clogged by the
confusion, half-choked by stupid blockades, largely unaware of their own
purposes, it is for criticism, organized research, and artistic
expression to free and to use these creative energies. They are to be
found in the aspirations of labor, among the awakened women, in the
development of business, the diffusion of art and science, in the racial
mixtures, and many lesser interests which cluster about these greater
movements.

The desire for a human politics is all about us. It rises to the surface
in slogans like "human rights above property rights," "the man above the
dollar." Some measure of its strength is given by the widespread
imitation these expressions have compelled: politicians who haven't the
slightest intention of putting men above the dollar, who if they had
wouldn't know how, take off their hats to the sentiment because it seems
a key to popular enthusiasm. It must be bewildering to men brought up,
let us say, in the Hanna school of politics. For here is this nation
which sixteen years ago vibrated ecstatically to that magic word
"Prosperity"; to-day statistical rhetoric about size induces little but
excessive boredom. If you wish to drive an audience out of the hall tell
it how rich America is; if you wish to stamp yourself an echo of the past
talk to us young men about the Republican Party's understanding with God
in respect to bumper crops. But talk to us about "human rights," and
though you talk rubbish, we'll listen. For our desire is bent that way,
and anything which has the flavor of this new interest will rivet our
attention. We are still uncritical. It is only a few years since we began
to center our politics upon human beings. We have no training in that
kind of thought. Our schools and colleges have helped us hardly at all.
We still talk about "humanity" as if it were some strange and mystical
creature which could not possibly be composed of the grocer, the
street-car conductor and our aunts.

That the opinion-making people of America are more interested in human
welfare than in empire or abstract prosperity is an item that no
statesman can disregard in his thinking. To-day it is no longer necessary
to run against the grain of the deepest movements of our time. There is
an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be
measured in human happiness. This feeling has not always existed.
Historians tell us that the very idea of progress in well-being is not
much older than, say, Shakespeare's plays. As a general belief it is
still more recent. The nineteenth century may perhaps be said to mark its
popularization. But as a fact of immediate politics, as a touchstone
applied quickly to all the acts of statecraft in America it belongs to
the Twentieth Century. There were any number of people who long before
1900 saw that dollars and men could clash. But their insight had not won
any general acceptance. It is only within the last few years that the
human test has ceased to be the property of a small group and become the
convention of a large majority. A study of magazines and newspapers would
confirm this rather broad generalization. It would show, I believe, how
the whole quality of our most impromptu thinking is being influenced by
human values.

The statesman must look to this largely unorganized drift of desire. He
will find it clustering about certain big revolts--the unrest of women,
for example, or the increasing demands of industrial workers. Rightly
understood, these social currents would, I believe, lead to the central
issues of life, the vital points upon which happiness depends. They come
out of necessities. They express desire. They are power.

Thus feminism, arising out of a crisis in sexual conditions, has
liberated energies that are themselves the motors of any reform. In
England and America voting has become the symbol of an aspiration as yet
half-conscious and undefined. What women want is surely something a great
deal deeper than the privilege of taking part in elections. They are
looking for a readjustment of their relations to the home, to work, to
children, to men, to the interests of civilized life. The vote has become
a convenient peg upon which to hang aspirations that are not at all sure
of their own meaning. In no insignificant number of cases the vote is a
cover by which revolutionary demands can be given a conventional front.
The ballot is at the utmost a beginning, as far-sighted conservatives
have guessed. Certainly the elimination of "male" from the suffrage
qualifications will not end the feminist agitation. From the angle of
statecraft the future of the movement may be said to depend upon the wise
use of this raw and scattered power. I do not pretend to know in detail
how this can be done. But I am certain that the task of leadership is to
organize aspiration in the service of the real interests of life. To-day
women want--what? They are ready to want something: that describes fairly
the condition of most suffragettes. Those who like Ellen Key and Olive
Shreiner and Mrs. Gilman give them real problems to think about are
drafting that energy into use. By real problems I mean problems of love,
work, home, children. They are the real interests of feminism because
they have produced it.

The yearnings of to-day are the symptoms of needs, they point the course
of invention, they are the energies which animate a social program. The
most ideally conceived plan of the human mind has only a slight interest
if it does not harness these instinctive forces. That is the great lesson
which the utopias teach by their failure--that schemes, however nicely
arranged, cannot be imposed upon human beings who are interested in other
things. What ailed Don Quixote was that he and his contemporaries wanted
different things; the only ideals that count are those which express the
possible development of an existing force. Reformers must never forget
that three legs are a Quixotic ideal; two good legs a genuine one.

In actual life, yes, in the moil and toil of propaganda, "movements,"
"causes" and agitations the statesman-inventor and the political
psychologist find the raw material for their work. It is not the business
of the politician to preserve an Olympian indifference to what stupid
people call "popular whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad" and the
ephemeral outcry is all very well in the biographies of dead men, but
rank nonsense in the rulers of real ones. Oscar Wilde once remarked that
only superficial people disliked the superficial. Nothing, for example,
could on the surface be more trivial than an interest in baseball scores.
Yet during the campaign of 1912 the excitement was so great that Woodrow
Wilson said on the stump he felt like apologizing to the American people
for daring to be a presidential candidate while the Giants and the Red
Sox were playing for the championship. Baseball (not so much for those
who play it), is a colossal phenomenon in American life. Watch the crowds
in front of a bulletin board, finding a vicarious excitement and an
abstract relief from the monotony of their own lives. What a second-hand
civilization it is that grows passionate over a scoreboard with little
electric lights! What a civilization it is that has learned to enjoy its
sport without even seeing it! If ever there was a symptom that this
nation needed leisure and direct participation in games, it is that poor
scrawny substitute for joy--the baseball extra.

It is as symptomatic as the labor union. It expresses need. And
statesmanship would find an answer. It would not let that passion and
loyalty be frittered away to drift like scum through the nation. It would
see in it the opportunity of art, play, and religion. So with what looks
very different--the "syndicalist movement." Perhaps it seems preposterous
to discuss baseball and syndicalism in the same paragraph. But that is
only because we have not accustomed ourselves to thinking of social
events as answers to human needs. The statesman would ask, Why are there
syndicalists? What are they driving at? What gift to civilization is in
the impetus behind them? They are human beings, and they want human
things. There is no reason to become terror-stricken about them. They
seem to want things badly. Then ostriches disguised as judges cannot deal
with them. Anarchism--men die for that, they undergo intolerable insults.
They are tarred and feathered and spat upon. Is it possible that
Republicans, Democrats and Socialists clip the wings more than free
spirits can allow? Is civilization perhaps too tightly organized? Have
the irreconcilables a soul audacious and less blunted than our
domesticated ones? To put it mildly, is it ever safe to ignore them
entirely in our thinking?

We shall come, I think, to a different appraisal of agitations. Our
present method is to discuss whether the proposals are right and
feasible. We do this hastily and with prejudice. Generally we decide that
any agitation foreign to our settled habits is wrong. And we bolster up
our satisfaction by pointing to some mistake of logic or some puerility
of statement. That done, we feel the agitation is deplorable and can be
ignored unless it becomes so obstreperous that we have to put it in jail.
But a genuine statecraft would go deeper. It would know that even God has
been defended with nonsense. So it could be sympathetic to agitations. I
use the word sympathetic literally. For it would try to understand the
inner feeling which had generated what looks like a silly demand. To-day
it is as if a hungry man asked for an indigestible food, and we let him
go hungry because he was unwise. He isn't any the less hungry because he
asks for the wrong food. So with agitations. Their specific plans may be
silly, but their demands are real. The hungers and lusts of mankind have
produced some stupendous follies, but the desires themselves are no less
real and insistent.

The important thing about a social movement is not its stated platform
but the source from which it flows. The task of politics is to understand
those deeper demands and to find civilized satisfactions for them. The
meaning of this is that the statesman must be more than the leader of a
party. Thus the socialist statesman is not complete if he is a good
socialist. Only the delusion that his truth is the whole truth, his party
the human race, and his program a panacea, will produce that singleness
of vision.

The moment a man takes office he has no right to be the representative of
one group alone. He has assumed the burden of harmonizing particular
agitations with the general welfare. That is why great agitators should
not accept office. Men like Debs understand that. Their business is to
make social demands so concrete and pressing that statesmen are forced to
deal with them. Agitators who accept government positions are a
disappointment to their followers. They can no longer be severely
partisan. They have to look at affairs nationally. Now the agitator and
the statesman are both needed. But they have different functions, and it
is unjust to damn one because he hasn't the virtues of the other.

The statesman to-day needs a large equipment. The man who comes forward
to shape a country's policy has truly no end of things to consider. He
must be aware of the condition of the people: no statesman must fall into
the sincere but thoroughly upper class blunder that President Taft
committed when he advised a three months' vacation. Realizing how men and
women feel at all levels and at different places, he must speak their
discontent and project their hopes. Through this he will get power.
Standing upon the prestige which that gives he must guide and purify the
social demands he finds at work. He is the translator of agitations. For
this task he must be keenly sensitive to public opinion and capable of
understanding the dynamics of it. Then, in order to fuse it into a
civilized achievement, he will require much expert knowledge. Yet he need
not be a specialist himself, if only he is expert in choosing experts. It
is better indeed that the statesman should have a lay, and not a
professional view. For the bogs of technical stupidity and empty
formalism are always near and always dangerous. The real political genius
stands between the actual life of men, their wishes and their needs, and
all the windings of official caste and professional snobbery. It is his
supreme business to see that the servants of life stay in their
place--that government, industry, "causes," science, all the creatures of
man do not succeed in their perpetual effort to become the masters.

I have Roosevelt in mind. He haunts political thinking. And indeed, why
shouldn't he? What reality could there be in comments upon American
politics which ignored the colossal phenomenon of Roosevelt? If he is
wholly evil, as many say he is, then the American democracy is
preponderantly evil. For in the first years of the Twentieth Century,