Thereis force enough in ordinary sunshine to turn all the mills in the world; and there is beneficent energy enough in any community to make the people perfectly happy. But it is cramped and deflected, poisoned by misuse, and turned to hateful ends. The question is how to liberate energy.
People are fond of thinking the millennium is impossible; but so long as happiness is dependent on a right use of the faculties, there is no reason why the millennium should not be reached, and that soon or unexpectedly. We all know individuals so harmoniously framed that we say, “If theirs were the common temper of mankind, we should be happy.” None of the externals of life, about which there is so much buffeting, control the question. Happiness is in a nutshell. Anybody can have it. You are happy if you get out of bed on the right side. I can never stop wondering at the awfulsimplicity of the principle on which mankind is constructed. Little Alice in the Looking-Glass could not reach the porch till she turned her back on it and walked straight into the door. Renounce the search for happiness and you find the substance. There is nothing else in the law and the prophets.
We see most men like tee-totums spinning to the left and leading a dismal life. How shall we get their motive power to spin them to the right, and make them happy? The practical question is: how to use the power of sunlight to turn our mills. How can we hold up a prism to the times that shall disintegrate these rays of complex force, and then adjust a lens that shall focus the powers of good and make them turn the wheels of society? The elements are before us, ceaselessly in motion. πάντα ῥεῖ. The most adamantine institutions are cloud palaces. There is no stability anywhere; and if you have a steady eye you will see that the whole fabric is in a flux. Nor are the changes arbitrary. The formations and re-formations are governed by laws as certain as those of astronomy. Study the changes and you will find the laws. Subserve the laws and you can affect the formations. Julius Cæsar did no more.
The strands of prejudice and passion that bind people together pulsate with life. All these fellow-citizens are human beings, and there is no one of them whom we cannot understand, reach, influence. The ordinary modes of intercourse are at hand. Chief among them you find the great machinery of government. It dwarfs every other agency, whether for good or ill. In America this machinery was designed to be at the service of anybody. It is an advertising agency for ideas, and it is very much more than this; since the fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge. You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it. And on the other hand, no amount of verbal proof will justify a new thought until it has been put in practice.
Alas for ink and paper! There is in all speech and writing a conventional presumption that human beings shall be logical, or fixed quantities, or at least coherent creatures. For the purposes of an essay or a speech, you prove your case, and carry weightaccordingly. If you are very cogent and conclusive, why, you win. Hurrah! the world is saved. But in real life there are no fixed quantities; all the terms are variables.
For example, everybody understands what is meant by the “Moral Law.” People differ only as to the application of that law. Not long ago I heard a sermon on this law, in which great stress was laid on the fact that it was a discovered law whereby the truth prevailed. Any truce with evil meant defeat for the cause of righteousness. This was the law of God, tested by experience, and in constant operation like the law of gravity, a thing you could not escape. The preacher pictured the solitary struggle of the great man seeking truth, his proclamation of the truth, the refusal of the world to receive it, and the prophet’s isolation and apparent failure. Nevertheless what the prophet said had always the same content. It was an appeal to the instincts of man upon the question of right and wrong, and in the end it was accepted.
Now the man who made this exposition, and it was admirable, is in regard to politics a believer in compromise. I think I have never known him support the idealist cause in a campaign; and upon most occasions ofcrisis he is found heartily throwing stones at the crusaders.
What words in any language can make this man understand that his law—which he really does profoundly understand as a law—applies to reform movements? Why, no words will do it, only example. New statements about morality, however eloquent, add nothing to our knowledge. Everything is known about the moral law, except how you yourself will act under given circumstances. You have nothing but example to contribute.
People interrogate force. They are unconvinced, and are carried, still protesting, through the air and deposited in a new place. And then, thereafter, they agree with you about the whole matter. Mere intellectual assent to your proposition is, even when you can get it, worth nothing. Your object is not to confute, but to stimulate. What you really want is that every man you meet shall drop his business and devote his entire life and energy to your cause. You will accept nothing less than this. Is it not clear that people are not moved by logic? Your conduct must ultimately square with reason and be justified by the laws of the universe and the constitution of other people’s minds;but you must value only that approval which comes from the deeper fibres in men. You need not be concerned about the bickerings of contemporary misunderstanding. Leave these for the historical society. Act first—explain afterwards. That is the way to get heard. Must you show your passport and certificate of birth and legitimacy to every editor and every lackey? They’ll find out who you are by and by. It is easier to knock a man down than to say why you do it. The act is sometimes needed, and wisdom then approves it after the event. People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this,—that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.
Such are the practical dictates of agitation. Their justification lies always with events. It may be that you must wait seven centuries for an audience, or it may be that in two years your voice will be heeded. If you are really a forerunner of better times, the times will appear and explain you. It will then turn out that your movement was the keynote of the national life. You really differed from your neighbors only in this,—that your mind had gone faster than theirs along the road all were travelling.
We are all slaves of the age; we can only see such principles as society reveals. The philosophy of other ages does us little good. We repeat the old formulas and cry up the prophets; but we see no connection between the truth we know so well in print and its counterpart in real life. The moral commonplaces, as, for instance, “Honesty is the best policy,” “A single just man can influence an entire community,” “Never compromise a principle,” are social truths. They are always true, but they are only obviously true in very virtuous communities. In a vile community the influence of a just man is potent but not visible. In a perfectly virtuous era it is clear that a cheat could not drive a fraudulent trade.
A seer is a man with such sharp eyes for cause and effect that he sees social truth, even under unfavorable conditions. And yet even the seers generally had auspicious weather,—that is to say, storms of moral passion. The whole race of Jews lived in fervent exaltation for generations, and revealed to their sharp-sighted prophets deep glimpses of social truth. Hence the Bible. “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country.” What happy precision! What sound generalization! But every townshipin Israel had its prophet, and the truth was a commonplace.
All the world’s moral wisdom would turn into literal truth upon the regeneration of society. It tends to become obvious in regenerative eras. In dark ages it becomes paradox. Standards are multiplied, and makeshift theories come in,—one rule for social conduct, another for business, another for politics. Expedient supplants principle. Indeed you may gauge the degradation of an age by the multiplicity of its standards. It is the same with the fine arts. To the men that made the statues and the pictures, these things were the shortest symbols of truth, and required no explanation. In the dark ages that followed they became a mystery and a paradox. But the traditions and objects survived and had to be accounted for. An age that cannot produce them requires a philosophy of æsthetics. Thus a thousand reasons are given to explain their existence, and finally it is agreed that they are something superfluous and fictitious,—conventional lies, like poetry, like loving your neighbor.
Nothing but a general increase of interest in the aspect of common things would explain to us the great masters. A revival ofinterest in the way the world looks is the precursor of painting: the perceptions of every one are quickening. And so we may be sure that we are upon the edge of a better era when the old moral commonplaces begin to glow like jewels and the stones to testify.
You cannot expect any one but a scientist to be startled at the movement of a glacier. But if you distribute a few micrometric instruments upon that gloomy ice-field, the American civic consciousness, and if you take observations not oftener than once in three years, you will be startled. The direction of the general movement is absolutely right. But it all moves together. Special signs of progress imply general progress, and hence comes the extraordinary and scientific interest in the awakening of this community. It is like a man lapsed into the deepest coma who is beginning to stir. Watch him, take his pulse, surround him with every apparatus of experimental physiology, and you will find the laws of health, the norm of progress.
Art and literature, and that moral atmosphere which makes a society worth moving in, lie on the other side of the great reaction, the spiritual revival which we seenow faintly beginning; and it is because these things can be got at only by stimulating American character that these reform movements are of value. Here at least the circulation throbs. Political reform—that is to say, a political life in which men who are personally honest predominate, a politics run by ideas—will come in as fast as the public develops ideas, and not before. But an idea is something very different from what you who read this think it is. An idea is a thing that governs your conduct all the time. For instance, you assent to the notion of independence in politics; you understand the lost-cause theory, but you won’t vote the ticket. Why? You don’t want to get out of your class. The relations between thought and action in you are not normal. Half of your brain has never functioned, and the paralysis shows in your politics. You have no idea. It is not this sort of idea that expels rascals or makes books or music. What passes for political thought in your vocabulary is like the phantasma in the brain of the Indian priest who is buried with the corn growing above him. The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of theprinciples of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.
Imagine a tea-party of pre-Raphaelites discussing Dante; they dote on his style, his passion, his force, his quality. In walks Dante, grim, remorseless, harsh, powerful. The man represents everything they hate. He is a horror and an outrage. The whole region of literature that these men live in is not more fictitious than the region of political thought in which the effete American—I mean your banker, your college president, your writer of editorial leaders—lives. Exclude for the moment those who are financially corrupt and consider only the men of intellect, and in all that concerns politics they are as removed from real ideas as Rossetti was removed from the real Dante.
Imagine a company of people on a voyage. They play whist with one another for dimes, and they spend all their money on the steward and continue to play with counters, andthe ship goes to wreck, and they sit on the beach and continue to play with pebbles. That is American politics. The whole thing is one gigantic sham, one transcendent fraud.
It makes no difference which man is made president; it makes no difference which is governor. There is no choice between McKinley and Bryan, between Republicanism and Democracy. There is no difference between them. They are one thing. They both and all of them are part of the machinery by which the government of a most dishonest nation is carried on, for the financial benefit of certain parties,—certain thousands of men who have bank accounts and eat and drink and bring up their families on the proceeds of this complicated swindle.
There is no reality in a single phrase uttered in politics, no meaning in one single word of any of it. There is no man in public life who stands for anything. They are shadows; they are phantasmagoria. At best they cater to the better elements; at worst they frankly subserve the worst. There is no one who stands for his own ideas himself, by himself, a man. If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left inyou, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic party or the Republican party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era,—then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem, and you must be educated and drawn forward towards real life. This process is going on. As the community returns to life, it sees the natural world for a moment and then forgets it. The blood flushes the brain and then recedes. You yourself voted once against both parties, when you thought you could win, and when you were excited. You quoted Isaiah and I know not what poetry, and were out and out committed to principle; but to-day you are cold and hopeless. At present, hope is a mystery to you. Nevertheless the utility of those early reform movements survives. They heated the imagination of the people till the people had a momentary vision of truths which not all of them forgot; and so each year the temperature has been higher, the mind of the community clearer.
We must not regard those broken reeds, the renegade leaders of reform movements,as villains; though the mere record of their words and conduct might prove them such. They have been men emerging from a mist. They see clearly for a moment, and then clouds sweep before them. Vanity, selfishness, ambition, tradition, habit, intervene like a fog. They have been betrayed, too, by the fickle public, that would not stand by them when in trouble. In the recapture of any institution by the forces of honesty there are trenches that get filled by slaughtered honor.
This whole revolution means the invasion of politics by new men. At first they are tyros, unstable, untried, well-meaning fellows. Half of them crack in the baking. But there are more coming, and the fibre is growing tougher and the eyes clearer; soon we shall have men. A great passion is soon to replace the feeble conscientious motive that has hitherto brought the new men forward: ambition,—the ambition to stand for ideas, for ideas only, and to get heard. We have almost forgotten that public life is the natural ambition of every young man. Conditions have made it contemptible. But these struggles signify that a change in those conditions has already begun. Your work and mine may be summed up in oneword. Make it possible for a young man to go into public life untarnished, and as an enemy to every extant evil. You must have men who will not go except on these terms. The times herald such men. They will appear. We must prepare for them.
The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart. The instant he declares war, every inducement is offered to make him stop. “Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail” intervene. The instant he stops fighting he is allied with the enemy: he is bought up by prejudice or by fatigue. He begins to realize the importance of particular visible institutions, as if their sole value did not comefrom the fraction of unselfishness they represent. He rushes headlong into trade, and thenceforth can see his country only as a series of trade interests. He gets into some church and begins to value its organization, or into some party and begins to value its past, or into some club and begins to value his friends’ feelings. The consequence is that you may search Christendom and hardly find a man who is free. The advance of the world, like the improvement of our local politics, has always been the work of young men. It is done by men before their minds have been worn into ruts by particular businesses, or their sight shortened by the study of near things. What we love in the young is not their youth, but their force. The energy that runs through them makes them sensitive. They feel the importance of remote things, and infer the relations of the present to the future more truly than their elders. They are touched by hints. The direct language of humanity is plain and native to them. The invisible waves of force which do as a matter of fact rule the world, using its fictions and its phrases as mere transmitting-plates, strike keenly upon the heart of the youth, and the vibrations of instinctive passion that shake his frameare the response of a strong creature to the laws of its universe. This unlearned knowledge of good and evil is like the response of the eyes to light or of the tongue to the taste of a fruit. It was not indoctrinated; it is a reaction to a stimulus.
So long as the world shall last, men will be writing books in order to explain and justify the instincts; inventing theologies and ethical codes, and projecting political programs to advance and confirm them.
If you take up some particular matter and begin to trace out its consequences upon mankind, you find yourself forced boldly to embrace the sum of all human destiny. We cannot follow out this course in detail. We see only tendency; we see only influence. Enlarge our horizon as we will, we cannot live out the lives of all future generations, and thus furnish an answer to the first caviller who interrupts our argument with a “cui bono.” The generous impulses of youth represent a vision of consequences. They take in more of the future at one glance than a philosopher can state in a year.
Certainly, so far as we can follow out the threads of influence, the lines seem to converge. They make a figure and point to aconclusion exactly upon that spot in the firmament where instinct would place it. If philosophy gives us a diagram, the rest of life fills it up, and embellishes it with infinite illustration. The proofs multiply, and are hurled in upon us from all quarters of life and all provinces of endeavor. The anecdotes and fables of the world, its drama, its poetry and fiction, its religion and piety, its domestic teaching and its monuments support this instinct, and describe the same figure. Further still, there is not a man who does not reveal it in his soul’s anatomy: so much so that upon every occasion except where his interests are touched, he is for virtue, and even where they are touched, it is only a question of a few degrees more heat to dissolve the habits and prejudices of a lifetime, and make him take off his coat and go into a war or a political campaign.
A single man, as we see him in one of the great modern civilizations, looks like a bit of machinery, a cog or a crank or an air-brake. The business man is especially mechanical, his functions are so accurate, so delimited and specialized. And yet any theory that dwells upon these limitations is put to shame in five minutes, for the creature eats and sheds tears before your eyes.All of the reasons for not doing some particular act that you think wise to be done, turn out to be founded on the idea that this man is a driving-wheel, and nothing but a driving-wheel. You cannot change him, they say, you must take him as he is. I have never heard any argument given against the wisdom of righteousness, except the existence of evil. “It exists, therefore subserve it.” Is it not clear that evil exists only because people subserve it? It has no fixity. Withdraw your support and it begins to perish. One man says, “Oh, let the world go. All the wickedness and unhappiness in it are inevitable.” Another says, “Some little concession to present conditions must be made.” Nothing can be said to justify the second man that is not moral support to the first. Your concession is always the acknowledgment of somebody’s weakness. Now you may make allowances for a man who has not come up to the mark; but if you make allowances for him beforehand, and assume that he is not going to do right, you corrupt him. If these things are true, then we are absolved from all complicity with vice. We need never take a course that requires to be explained. We thus get rid of a great oppression and can breathefreely. In the language of the old piety, Christian’s pack falls from his back. That pack has, in all ages, been a perversion of the conscience, a mistake as to the size of the universe.
We have seen all these ranks and armies of humanity pass in review before us, each man with his eyes fixed in mesmeric intensity upon some set of opinions, until he grew to be the thing he looked on. These opinions of his are all we know of him. They are not our own opinions. They often appear to us misguided and illusory; yet there is always to be found in them the light of some benevolence. They are like broken mirrors and give back fractions of a larger idea. The hope and courage in each of these men bless and advance the world; but not in the way that the men themselves expect. They seem all to be bent over a game of chess, where every move has its real significance upon another board which they do not see. Each man seems to be following some will-o’-the-wisp across a landscape at night. No cannon can waken these insensate sleepers. And yet they are tracing out patterns and geometrical diagrams upon the sward; they are weaving a magical dance that, for all its intricacy, hasa planetary rhythm, and the sober motion of a pendulum. Each individual in this unthinkable host gives an instance of the same fatality; first, that he becomes the thing he looks on, and second, that he accomplishes something that he does not understand.
And both parts of this fatality must hold true of ourselves. Certainly, our subjection to the thing we look on is almost pitiable. We cannot even remember a righteous hatred without beginning to take color from the thing we hate. Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation.
As for the last half of that fatality, that keeps us forever ignorant of the true meaning of our lives, it is not an absolute ignorance, like our ignorance of how we came to exist. It is a qualified ignorance, like our ignorance that we have hurt some one’s feelings. The elements of understanding are within us: to-morrow the whole matter may become clear. The borders of our understanding extend, as we push outward our frontier of inquiry. This is both a frontier of scepticism, and of faith. It is a bulwark of doubt as to the value of our last newformula, and of faith as to the reality behind that formula. As we go forward, bringing our lives down to date, holding our experience at arm’s length and examining it with a merciless endeavor to wring the truth out of it, we do, from day to day, get a clearer notion of the actual world, a truer idea of our own place in it. This qualified and modest understanding of life, that comes from putting things together that seem to go together, is within the power of any one.
And we find this: the more unselfish men become, the more sensitive do they become in understanding human relations. The gambler cannot see that he is giving pain to his family; his self-indulgence has blunted his sensibilities. The faith healer knows that he is curing a man in a neighboring State; his love for mankind has refined his sensibilities. Most of us stand somewhere between these two extremes in the scale of understanding, and are moving towards one or the other. Education, then, is the process by which we gradually discover both the real nature of the human life about us, and our own relation to the whole of it. The process is never complete. Even poets and great men are in the dark about their own function;but they are less in the dark than the rest of us. They speak from a knowledge that is greater than ours. They have a wonderful power over us; for they help us in our struggle to see the world as it is.