XXVI
I say famous, and perhaps I mean only notorious, for in the beginning many of his townsmen meant it as a reflection, and not a tribute. Some of them said it was but an advertising dodge, a bit of demagogism, but as Jones applied the rule to everybody, other explanations had soon to be adopted, and after he had employed it about the City Hall for two years the situation became so desperate that something had to be done. Controversy was provoked, and for almost a decade, Toledo presentedthe unique spectacle of a modern city in which this principle was discussed as though it were something newly discovered. Some seemed to think that Jones had invented it; they said it was absurd, that it really would not work. Of course most regarded it, as most now regard the Golden Rule, as a pretty sentiment merely, something for the children in Sunday-school. It is considered, of course, as any sophisticated person knows, as altogether impractical, and even silly and absurd.
To be sure, the clergymen were under some sort of professional necessity of treating it seriously, and they used to prepare profound papers, arranged in heads and subheads, with titles and subtitles, and after all the usual ostentatious preliminary examination of the grounds and the authorities, and with the appearance of academic fairness, in discussions that were formal, exact, redolent of the oil, bearing the hallmark of the schools, they would show that Jesus meant there were only certain exigencies in which, and certain persons to whom, this rule was to be applied. It was all very learned and impressive, but one was apt to develop a disturbing doubt as to whether one was of those to whom it was to be applied. It was certainly not to be applied to criminals, or perhaps even to politicians. It was not to be applied to poor people, or to the working people, unless they were in Sunday-school as conscious inferiors, in devout and penitent attitudes. And as these people were so seldom in church or Sunday-school, and as those who were there apparently needed no such consideration, these discoursesleft one rather uncertain as to what to do with the Golden Rule.
All men of course believe in the Golden Rule, or say they do, but they believe in it only “up to a certain point,” and with each individual this point differs; the moment in which to abandon the Rule and take to “the shotgun and the club” comes to some soon, to others late, and to some oftener than others; but to most, if not to all of us, it inevitably arrives. That is why, no doubt, the world is no farther along in the solution of the many distressing problems it has on its mind.
According to the standards of conduct and of “honor” inherited from the feudal ages, while personal violence may be conceded to be illegal, one is, nevertheless, still generally taught that it is wrong and unmanly not to resent an insult or an injury, by violence, if necessary,—fighting and killing, by individuals, states and nations, are thought to be not only honorable and worthy, but, in many cases, indispensable. Society has an obsession similar to that strange superstition of the feud, which affects the Kentucky mountaineers. Generally we are less afraid to fight than we are not to fight. Our system is based on force, our faith is placed in force, so that nearly all of the proposals of reform, for the correction of abuses, involve the use of violence in some form. We have erected a huge idol in the figure of the beadle, who, assisted by the constable, is to make society over, to make men “good.” Jones came upon the scene in America at a time when there was undoubtedly a new and really splendid impetus towarda better and higher conception of life and conduct, both in public and private. Yet even then no other thought seemed to possess the public mind than that someone should be put in prison and made to suffer.
Men did not and do not see what Jones saw so much more clearly than any other reformer of his time, namely that, above all the laws men make with their political machines in their legislatures, there is a higher law, and that the Golden Rule is a rule of conduct deduced from that law. He saw that men, whether they knew it or not, liked it or not, or were conscious of it or not, had in all times been living, and must forever go on living, under the principle on which the Golden Rule is based. That is, Jones saw that this great law had always existed in the universe, just as the law of gravitation existed before Newton discovered it. It is inherent in the very constitution of things, as one of that body of laws which govern the universe and always act and react equally among men. And Jones felt that men should for their comfort, if for no higher motive, respect this law and get the best out of life by observing it; and that it should be the business of men through their governments to seek out this law and the rules that might scientifically be deduced from it, instead of putting their faith in their own contrivances of statutes, resolutions, orders, and decrees, and, when these would not work, trying to make them effective through grand juries and petit juries, and all the hideous machinery of jails and prisons, and scaffolds and electric chairs. And because he had no superstitious reverence for policemen or their clubs,or for soldiers and their bayonets and machine guns, they said he had no reverence for law.
He had, of course, been to the legislature; he had seen the midnight sessions there, when statutes were enacted amid scenes of drunken riot and confusion, and he saw no reason why he should have reverence for the acts of these men. Perhaps he was wrong; I am only trying to tell how it appeared to him. He was not a lawyer, but he knew what many lawyers have never learned, that there is sometimes a vast difference between a statute and a law. He saw that not all statutes are laws; that they are laws only when, by accident or design, they are in conformity with those rules by which the universe is governed, whether in the physical or the spiritual world, and these laws, eternal and immutable, are invariable, self-executing, instant in operation, without judges to declare them, or executives to enforce them, or courts to say whether they are unconstitutional or not.
He saw that the law on which the Golden Rule is founded, the law of moral action and reaction, is the one most generally ignored. Its principle he felt to be always at work, so that men lived by it whether they wished to or not, whether they knew it or not. According to this law, hate breeds hate and love produces love in return; and all force begets resistance, and the result is the general disorder and anarchy in which we live so much of the time.
It may be that in this view of life some dangerous apothegms are involved; as we grow older we grow conservative, and conservatism is a kind of cynicism,a kind of fear, the trembling distrust of age. But I know that in the life concept to which Jones came in his study of this principle, every act of his life, no matter how trifling and insignificant it may have seemed, suddenly took on a vast and vital significance; so that the hasty glance, the unkind word, the very spirit in which a thing is said or done, were seen to have an effect which may reach farther than the imagination can go, an effect not only on one’s own life and character, but on the lives and characters of all those about him. He was always human; I say that to prevent any impression that he was solemn or priggish; he deliberately took up smoking, for instance, toward the end of his days, because, he said with a chuckle, one must have some vices. And sometimes when the Golden Rule seemed not to “work,” he would truly say it was only because he didn’t know how to work it. And he used to quote Walt Whitman:
The song is to the singer and comes back most to him;The love is to the lover and comes back most to him;The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail.
The song is to the singer and comes back most to him;The love is to the lover and comes back most to him;The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail.
The song is to the singer and comes back most to him;
The love is to the lover and comes back most to him;
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail.