LVIII
Meanwhile, the education of the general mind went on, and we were, after all, tending somewhither. Our experience in the greatest of our tasks demonstrated that, and in the change that gradually took place in sentiment concerning the street railway problem, there was an evidence of the development of a mass consciousness, a mass will, which some time in these cities of ours will justify democracy. It is of course the most difficult process in the world, for a mass of two hundred thousand people to unite in the expression of a will concerning a single abstract proposition. The mass to be sure can now and then as it were rear its head and blaze forth wrath and accomplish some instant work of destruction; even if it be nothing more than the destruction of an individual reputation. That is why the recall is so popular and so generously and frequently employed in those cities that have it. In such elections, with their personal and human center of interest, the people all turn out, while in a referendum involving some abstract principle, the vote cast is always small. That is why the referendum is so important, and the recall, relatively, so unimportant; the use of the first in the long run will afford a fine schooling for the people.
The most familiar expression of this rage of course was the clamor for the indictment and imprisonment of someone connected in sinister ways with the company, a demand with which I never hadthe slightest sympathy, to which I could never yield the slightest acquiescence. What good, though all the poor and miserable servitors of privilege were put in prison, while privilege itself remained? Such clamors have had their results; a few more broken lives, a little more sorrow and shame in the world, and the clamor ceases, and things go on the same as before.
It is this instability, this variableness, this weariness of the public mind, on which privilege depends, with a cynical trust so often justified that it might breed cynicism in all observant and reflective natures. The street railway proprietors in Toledo expected each election to demonstrate this weariness in the people, and to restore them to, or at least confirm them in, the privileges they had enjoyed under the old régime.
For a people to assume and for a decade consistently to maintain an attitude toward a public question therefore was a triumph of the democratic principle. That is what the people of Cleveland did; that is what the people of Detroit did; that is what the people of Toledo did. The successive stages of this process were most interesting to observe, the more especially since they caught in the movement even some of the street railway group and its political confreres themselves.
In its origin the public will was destructive no doubt, that was the inarticulate disgust born of the long endurance of inadequate service, all the miseries of that contemptuous exploitation of the people so familiar in all the cities of America. Tothis, on the customary revelations of a corrupt domination of the political machinery of the city by the street railway company, there was added a moral rage—the one element needed to provide the spark for the mine. At first this rage against the company was such that any action taken by officials was popular so long as it injured or harassed or was somehow inimical to the company. And in consequence there was developed a kind of local jingoism or chauvinism; whenever popularity slackened or it was felt necessary to remind the electorate back in the ward of the sleepless vigilance of their representative in the council, a councilman had only to introduce some resolution that would be against the company’s interest. It was unfortunate, and had its evil phase, as any suggestion of intellectual dishonesty must ever have, and it made serious dealing with the subject extremely difficult and hazardous. It was difficult to recognize any of the company’s rights; and it was always at the risk of misunderstanding, and with the certainty of misrepresentation that this was done. But of course it was necessary to do this, in the course of the long and complicated transaction, that constant and inflexible opposition of the public with the private interest which now assumed the aspect of a noisy and furious war, and now the softer phases of diplomatic negotiations. Of course there were always those in town who knew exactly what was to be done; they could settle the vexatious problem with a facile gesture, between the whiffs of a cigarette on the back platform of a street car, or in an after dinner speechbetween the puffs of a cigar. The one was apt to advise that the “traction company be brought to time at once,” the other that an “equitable” settlement be “arranged” by conservative business men. Meanwhile the problem obviously consisted in the necessity of recognizing the private right in the proprietors and of securing the public right to the people, and to do this it was necessary to search out, and isolate, like some malignant organism, the injustice that somewhere lurked in this complex and irritating association.
In my first campaign we proposed to grant no renewal of franchises at a rate of fare higher than three cents. Jones had advised it, and I had been committed to it long before. It was Tom Johnson’s old slogan, and it was popular. I used to explain to the crowds my own conviction that the problem never would be settled until we had municipal ownership, but there was in Toledo in those days very little sentiment for municipal ownership, and my conviction met with no applause, and was received only with mild toleration. In the second campaign, there was more indorsement; in the third there was a certain enthusiasm for the principle, in the fourth it seemed to be almost unanimous, and now the principle has become one of the cardinal articles of faith. I do not wish it to appear that I had converted all these people to my view; I had not tried to do that, and doubtless could not have done so had I tried, but the conviction came by the very necessities of the situation.