Opponents of direct rule are more or less in the habit of speaking of it as the rule of the mob. Its advocates have no trouble in disposing of this characterization by pointing out that the distinguishing mark of a mob is disorder or lawlessness, while the process of taking a vote of the people, on measures even more than on men, is eminently orderly and regular. The phrase is open to objection; taken literally, it cannot be defended. But in all probability what those who use it really mean, more or less distinctly, is something very like what has been dwelt on in this paper. What they have in mind is not the turbulenceof the mob, but its brute power, its inaccessibility to complex considerations, its incapacity for taking counsel or modifying its purpose, the dumb finality of its acts. A system under which the highest questions of fundamental public policy were submitted to the peremptory decision of a majority vote at the polls would be so vitally different from the system of representative government as we have known it that, allowance made for the picturesque exaggeration of the figure, the likening of it to mob rule is by no means without excuse.
There are of course many advocates of the initiative and referendum who qualify their support in various ways; and, so far as that goes, there are many opponents who admit that, within proper limitations, these methods may be desirable. With all this I am not concerned. The real force behind the general movement—including not only direct legislation but also the recall of judges and the nullification of judicial decisions by popular vote—is the dogma of the inherent rightfulness of the unlimited rule of the majority. In the collection of papers on the subject issued by the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the leading place is given to a paper by Senator Bourne, of Oregon. Of any hesitation as to the application of the direct legislation method to the irreversible decision of fundamental questions, he shows not the faintest trace. On the contrary, it is precisely to questions of the highest moment, to the decision of issues of great sweep and significance, that he regards the application of the direct vote as peculiarly just and desirable. "It is not proposed," he says, "that the people shall act directly in all the intricate details of legislation." The great function of the initiative is in the field of ideas: "Under the initiative any man can secure the submission of his ideas to a vote of all the people, provided eight per cent. of the people sign a petition asking that the measure he proposes be so submitted." That any such question, so submitted, will be decided as it should be, Senator Bourne not only does not doubt, but apparently does not imagine that anybody else can be so perverse as to doubt. "The people of a state will never vote against their own interests, hence they will nevervote to adopt a law unless it proposes a change for the improvement of the general welfare." No sign of consciousness that there may be a difference between the interests of the majority and the interests of the whole people, between immediate interests and permanent interests, between apparent interests and real interests; still less of any possible conflict between interests—as that word is commonly understood—and the abiding principles of justice or of honor. The 300,000 are certain to be right if the count of noses against them is but 290,000. To be sure, no rational man can actually believe this; and there is little doubt that Senator Bourne would repudiate such an interpretation of his words. But there is equally little doubt as to the position he would fall back upon. "The chief function"—this is the declaration with which he opens his discussion—"the chief function of the initiative and referendum is to restore the absolute sovereignty of the people." The idea that the sovereignty of the people means absolute and unrestricted rule over the whole people according to the immediate will and pleasure of fifty-one per cent. of the people—a crude error whose almost unchallenged currency among the "progressives" of our day is one of the most remarkable psychological phenomena of our time—lies at the bottom of the whole direct-rule propaganda.
The Democrat was disillusioned, but he really was a democrat. He had been cradled and taught in the atmosphere of democracy, and was possessed by lifelong conviction of the righteousness of the democratic ideal. For a long time, too—until he had come to know more of the actual business of democracy—he had never questioned democratic practice. He was young and innocent.
But the scales had fallen from his eyes; the enlightened vision of manhood's years had disclosed in democracy a multitude of undemocratic things of whose existence in his youthful days he had not even dreamed. The preceptors of his boyhood had never told him—or his hopeful heart had not let him understand—that men had to struggle against other men to preserve even that equality to which they were born; that justice, even in the courts, could be, in the very nature of things, nothing more than an approximation, and that, among men of the world in general, it was often might that made right; that there were ways of depriving men of the ballot, in spite of enactments; that laws could be made by the will of minorities, or of single individuals. Even town-meetings could sometimes be undemocratic, and his ears were startled by those who declared that, in the nation's life at large, there was nothing left of democracy but seeming.
His faith in men had suffered the same rude shocks as his faith in democracy—quite naturally, for neither faith stood alone. He had come to see that the sordidness of human beings reached heights and depths which his youth, slow to believe and slower to perceive, had never imagined. Surely, the love of moneywasthe root of all evil—or of nearly all. The heated oratory of the campaign was mostly inspired by love of money or place. The patriotic sentiment that so abounded in the press was mostly gush, the news was colored, and the whole belonged to men with axes to grind. Yes, the press, that boasted educator of the people, of whose wondrous achievement andpotentiality—yes, and whose freedom—he and his schoolfellows had written and declaimed, was sometimes bought. Votes at the polls and in legislative halls were sometimes bought. Contracts with the government were sometimes bought. Expert scientific opinion was sometimes bought. War scares were manufactured for a purpose. Great industries could use intimidation to secure a party the votes of their employees. There was no form of meanness in life high or low that could not find ready a hand for its undertaking. Cities were sinks of rottenness and suffering because it paid their democratic administrators to have them so. The greed of men could force other men to live and beget their children in unhealthful, degrading environment, birth into which was birth into slavery and disease of body and soul. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was a mockery to tens of thousands.
And all this took place under a democracy—a government which he had been taught was the most equitable on earth, the refuge of the poor and the oppressed, who sailed into the haven where Liberty was Enlightening the World to enter the Land of Promise where all their tears should be wiped away! And the worst of it was, that those who talked most loudly of the democratic ideal were those most eager to profit at its expense. If he could have laid it all to the rich or the aristocratic, it would not have been so bad; but he couldn't. The poor were by nature as greedy and unjust as the rich, and showed themselves as bad in practice when they had the chance, and the democrat turned tyrant as soon as it suited his purse or ambition. It was dismaying. The contrast between the actual workings of democracy and the ideal his innocence had worshipped was so enormous that he sometimes doubted whether they had anything at all in common.
But in time dismay, and even surprise, had worn away, and he recovered equanimity. He was disillusioned, but still a democrat. At the same time he learned of the weakness of his idol, he learned of the weakness of human nature. He knew that the evils he lamented were due much more to human weakness than to theform of government under which the evils occurred. With a philosopher of his own land, he agreed that no form of government was so good as not to work ill in the hands of the bad, and none so bad as not to work well in the hands of the good. Henceforth, if he must worry, let it be about men.
Thus it was that the Democrat, from being a partisan, became a Spectator. Democracy—or what was called that—was amusing: it was so human—so human in its faults, so human in its self-deception. He was moved to smiles at the spectacle of a nation of individuals all wisely thinking themselves intelligent voters, patriots, and capable managers of their country's affairs.
Was it, after all, a democracy? The Democrat possessed the none too common art of looking behind mere words, and contemplating Things as They Are. He was reading his magazine one evening—it contained one of those comforting political science essays, entitled "Whither Are We Drifting?"—when the notion seized on him to find some better name for the government under which he lived. So he laid aside the essay, and let his thoughts run.
Elimination seemed to appeal as a method. He made a whimsical beginning: it wasn't a timocracy; however much the love of honor flourished, it seemed agreed that it was not that which ruled the nation. That the government wasn't an ochlocracy he also felt sure; for, in spite of the rule of mobs, in labor troubles, lynchings, institutions of learning, and weddings in high life, he well knew that the real authority of the land lay in fewer hands.
Was it, then, an aristocracy? That could not be, for no one was better than anyone else. In matters of personal worth there was no superlative; there was not even a comparative. At least, there was no surer path to defeat at the polls than for a candidate to be called "better," to say nothing of "best."
Whether it was a theocracy hardly needed consideration. True, the coin of the realm recorded the nation's Trust in God, and God was frequently quoted as being heartily in favor of a variety of political projects; but on the whole theDemocrat was convinced that the function of the inscription was decorative, and felt that any proposal to entrust God alone with the affairs of the nation would create a mighty upheaval in politics and commerce, and be followed by a period of depression. He couldn't really see that God had much part in the actual government, though he would not go so far as Epicurus, and say that He cared nothing about what men were doing. He felt more like agreeing with the Hebrew who conceived God as laughing men to derision. And besides, to say that the government was at present a theocracy would place the Democrat in the position of an adverse critic of the Almighty, which was as much as to say that he himself was better than the Almighty; and that would be undemocratic.
On the whole, those who called the government an oligarchy seemed to be getting more near to reality; for at certain crises it became quite clear that a few men determined the measures of government. And yet, the individuals of the group were not always the same, but varied according to the interests involved; and they were not an openly constituted and declared body, elected by the people. To be sure, they operated through legislators, but they themselves were more often than not far removed from open political life. To call the real government a plutocracy, its governing agents plutocrats, and their instruments the legislators, seemed reasonable enough. It was humiliating, it seemed the fact that the great democracy was ruled, not by itself, but by a Thing.
However, the rule of money, that is, financial self-interest, was not really a form of government; it was only an influence, and one that might work good as well as ill. It underlay, more or less, all governments, not only modern, but ancient as well, and had to, in the nature of things, so long as property existed and prosperity meant increase. What else did the phenomenon of economic history-writing signify but the appreciation of this fact?
The Democrat concluded to let the government under which he lived stand as a democracy. The term might not be absolutely sufficient, but it covered the case as well asany. At any rate, whatever the reality, the government was cast in the democratic mold: every man had a vote, and was sovereign over it, and could sell it, or throw it away, or even make use of it, as he chose; and he was represented, or at least thought he was, by someone whom he elected, or thought he elected; and was heeded when he clamored his desires or his indignation, provided it didn't interfere too much with what his representative was induced to conceive to be the interests of "the people."
And there were also other manifestations of the democratic ideal which really distinguished the government under which he lived from that of many other nations. There was democracy in education. The public set out to educateallits sons and daughters, from kindergarten to college Commencement. The day was past when education was only for gentlemen's sons; the children of the people, rich and poor, blue-blooded and flat-footed, male and female, brainy and brainless, came to college, and within its walls there was no connection, it was said, between honors and money or place. Students dressed from the same clothes-shop, yelled the same college yell, bought their apparatus at a co-operative store, ate at the same boarding-house, took the same examinations, often subserving the cause of democracy by evading aristocratic tyranny in the person of the faculty and making democratic use of their neighbors' learning, and asked no questions about each other's finances or forbears—except, of course, the fraternity and sorority students, who hadtria nominaand were the exceptions to prove the rule.
And not only were the college rolls and records indicative of democracy, but there was a democracy of subjects to study. You had free election: one subject was as good as another, one course as valuable as another. So long as you had the required number of credits, the character of the credits made no difference: an hour contained sixty minutes, and no hour set up to be better than its fellows. A college education was defined as "something of everything for everybody," and the definition was especially applicable to the education of the State Universities, those great examples of learning in action. In them anyonemight study anything at any time under any instructor under any conditions and in any place—for you could study in absence, and by correspondence, and hypnotism, and Christian Science. And when you got through, whatever your method or matter or capacity or docility or imbecility, you were labelled A. B., and were as good as any other A. B., and had a fortune assured—until you found out that the great democratic world thought A. B. no better than D. F., or any other combination of letters, or no letters at all.
Yes, and there was democracy of religion as well as of education. Ministers wore plain clothes, avoided religion in conversation, greeted everyone with the loudness which in some way had become confused with cordiality, romped with children, attended kissing parties, and used slang in sermons. Men believed anything, or nothing; it was a free country, a free age. Any religion, or any interpretation of it, was as good as any other, so long as you really believed it. You could pray kneeling, or standing, or sitting, or walking, or jumping—as you chose. You could interpret your creed literally, or symbolically, or allegorically, or pragmatically. You could devote your church edifice to God, or you could make it a meeting-house for the people, and use it for socials, athletics, kindergarten, lyceum, vaudeville, soup kitchens, rummage sales, teachers' institutes—and when all these religious activities grew too extensive for it, you could sell it to the liveryman or the storage company or the movie-man. What were churches for, if not for the people?
There was democracy in art, too—especially in literature. Poets wrote in what vein and in what meter they chose, at what length, with what attention to rhyme and rhythm, with what preparation or equipment they chose. They bowed before no laws, ancient or modern. If they made use of the great names in poetry, it was to justify their own vagaries. They not only pleaded Tennyson for Tennysonian liberties, but took what additional license they chose on the ground of personal liberty. Didn't Homer nod? Of course; and, taking advantage of the example, they slept the sleep of the unworrying. Poetscould write in prose, and prose authors dress their commonplace thoughts in verse. In oratory and the novel, matter was all, form nothing. Men were content if their readerscouldget their meaning; the compelling power of style and accurate expression were qualities for which they were unwilling to pay the price of long and patient preparation. Olympus, Helicon, and Arcadia had become the paradise of anarchists, to say nothing of democrats. Who cared now when Zeus's ambrosial locks were shaken in wrath, or Apollo slammed his baton down in a rage? Who were they, to set up to be better than others?
And, as for painters and sculptors, and architects and musicians, who should presume to tyrannize over them by requiring standards of style or subject? If an architect chose to construct a High School that looked like a prison or a warehouse, why shouldn't he? After all, what was the High School but the people's college, and what was its purpose if not to fit the sons and daughters of the commonwealth for life, and whyshouldit be built in the Tudor style, or in any other style? What the people needed was usefulness, not style. And if a musician wished to compose an overture imitative of all the noises that accompanied the Retreat from Moscow, including French and Russian profanity, or if a painter preferred to paint a drunken prostitute rather than Diana or a Daughter of the Revolution, why shouldn't he? It was a free country, a democratic age, and it was time art entered into the service of the people.
And there was democracy of manners, too, and of dress. Democracy had grown so used to insisting on clothes not making the man, that distinction in dress had long been a rarity, and men were no longer constrained to live up to the garb they wore. You could wear a white vest without obligation to keep it clean, and you could appear with silk hat and long coat without being suspected of religion or literature. Men made the clothes now: the process was reversed; they made them by the wholesale, every season, and if you weren't satisfied with a good democratic costume—i. e., the one imposed by the despotic democratic fashion of the season—and had yourclothing made to adorn, why, you were an aristocrat.
And if clothes didn't oblige, neither didnoblesse, that other aristocratic bugbear, oblige. Gentlemen? Family? Why, everyone was a gentleman, from pugilist to preacher. Who said so? Why, who but the gentleman himself? It was a free country, and a man had a right to be a gentleman if he chose, didn't he? Just what a gentleman was, to be sure, no one seemed able to say; but no one failed to lay claim to the title, or to pull off his coat and prove the justice of his claim if you denied it. Surely there was no greater proof of the beneficent power of democracy than that it made all men gentlemen, and all women ladies.
And there was democracy in the home as well. The American husband was so democratic that he bettered the apostolic instruction which told wives to be obedient to their husbands. You might have thought that it read the reverse. And children—the children of democratic America were famous the world over for their unquestioning assumption of knowledge and authority, for their assurance and aggressiveness; for their easy contradiction of their parents, who were intimidated by the pedagogical direction never to let your child fear you. Travellers returned from Europe and reported no Hans and Giovannino who made wide the mouth and thrust out the tongue in the streets of aristocracy. Since the time of the bald-headed prophet and the two and forty she-bears, it had been natural for youth to presume on its superiority, but it was only the spirit of democracy which seemed toencouragethe presumption.
But why not? If democracy meant equality, why not be consistent? If all men—black and white, good and bad, rich and poor, wise and foolish—were to be made equal, why not all women with them? Women were surely members of the commonwealth. And why not all children? Hadn't Spencer said so? Children were members of the commonwealth, too. And why not the beasts, wild and tame, who were also part and parcel of the population of the country? Why stop merely with men?
Yes, the Democrat concluded, his country was best described as a democracy, even though the few ruled over the many in matters of substance, and the many ruled over the few in art and manners, and both were tyrants. He remembered Plato's definition—Plato the blasphemer—and it seemed applicable to his own time: "Democracy, a charming form of government, full of variety and diversity, and dispensing equality to equals and unequals alike." It was marvellous how men believed in their equality with other men, what self-confidence they possessed, and what assurance came to them from the oft repeated word liberty. "This is a free country, and I'm just as good as you" could be said by anyone, and was said by everyone, and as a result his back was a little stiffer and his head a degree or two more erect. Foreigners learned to say it before they learned to speak the language. The very animals seemed to understand it; it was Plato over again: "And the horses and asses had come to have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of free men; and they would run at anybody whom they met in the street if he did not get out of their way: and all things were just ready to burst with liberty."
The Democrat, you see, through his habit of looking at Things as They Are, had come to possess a lively sense of the ridiculous side of democracy—its inconsistencies, its unconscious enjoyment of words, its silly self-deception and placid self-satisfaction.
Now that you have seen the workings of his mind, you will easily understand, too, how the expression of his thoughts might provoke those who were always on the lookout for the red rag of aristocracy. And the fact is, that on occasion he did express his thoughts with great frankness and no little vehemence; and, as no one likes to be told his faults by even a friendly critic, he often brought the angry hornets of democracy about his ears.
Yes, and by your smiling you seem to say that he deserved it. And yet I assure you now, as I did in the beginning, that he was really a democrat. You must not mistake realization of the faults of democracy in operation for hostility to democracy itself. He had seen something oflife in aristocratic countries, and was thankful above all things that therewassomething in the atmosphere of his own land which had the effect of making men look up. This virtue alone covered a multitude of the sins of democracy. Therewassomething in his country more than the mere form of democratic society. Whether men got their rights or not, they knew they had rights, and anyone who wanted to make them consent to injustice had at least to take the trouble of giving it the appearance of justice. And not only were they possessed of a lively sense of their own rights, but the air was full of talk about other people's havingtheirrights. Generosity and benevolence were abroad in the land. It was, to be sure, something of the sort of Sidney Smith's benevolence—the feeling which A experienced when he thought B ought to do something to relieve C's necessities; but even that kind was better than none. It was vastly important whether large classes of human beings acquiesced in being regarded as cattle—as they seemed to in the Old World—or not.
But if he had a vivid sense of the desirability of the democratic ideal, he had just as vivid a sense of the dangers of democratic practice. It was not difficult to see that the universal talk about making all men equal, vapid as it might be, was having an effect which could but make the judicious grieve. It was pulling excellence from her lofty seat to set her on a level with mediocrity. Democracy aimed at equality. But equality on a high plane was impossible. Certain men—most men—could not rise to a high plane, or would not. Those therefore who could climb were not to keep on climbing, but to remain at the lower level, or return from the heights, or assist those who were at the lowest of all. Not all could reach the mountain top; therefore let those whowereable to make the ascent engage in assisting the great majority to attain themiddlespace of the incline. Not all could take a college degree; therefore let the college degree be brought within the reach of all. Not all could be gentlemen; therefore reconstruct and democratize the definition of the gentleman. In scholarship, religion, manners, in literature, in all the arts—in everything except the art of makingmoney—democracy seemed in danger of fostering the mediocre, and discouraging the excellent. In its effort for breadth, it was encouraging shallowness. It might be that for the poorest, the meanest, and the stupidest, democracy meant individualism and opportunity; but for the brightest and most ambitious, it seemed to partake of the nature of tyranny. The main idea in Plato's Republic was the sacrifice of the individual to the whole. In the Modern Republic it seemed something like the sacrifice of the best to the good, the leveling down of the highest as well as the raising up of the lowest. Certain kinds of talent and effort were in great danger of neglect—the kind of talent and effort which had made nations live in history. If there was anything in the record of the past, if civilization was not on the wrong track, and if literature and religion and the arts were indeed the supremely worth while, it seemed plain that the encouragement of uniformity beyond limits was a crime against the race. The atoms of Democritus, streaming forever downward in parallel lines, would never have accomplished a world. It needed an Epicurus and a Lucretius to recognize that they must have swerved from their deadly course of uniformity. It took friction and collision to beget a universe. The democratic passion for freedom and equality and uniformity once fully realized, what deadness and monotony! And as for the boasted educating power of responsibility, there was as little chance for it in the frictionless machine of perfect democracy as under despotism itself.
Democracy certainly did savor of the machine; just as the object of machinery was to insure a uniform product without personal handling of each individual piece, so the object of democracy seemed to be in such wise to regulate the affairs of men that justice would be automatic.
The fact was, human laziness occupied great space in the foundations of the democratic spirit. There were other qualities also, of course. There was misapprehension. The democratic poor imagined ideal possession on the part of those more prosperous than themselves, and the democratic rich imagined the extreme of unpossession on the part of those poorer than themselves; and both forgot, orhad never discovered, what Horace knew two thousand years ago, that the poor man was seasick in the hired skiff the same as the rich man in his private trireme. And there was the spirit of restlessness—the everlasting desire of the human animal for new things, and his perennial ignorance of the fact that a change of sky did not necessarily mean a change of heart. And of course there was human sympathy, the greatest of them all.
But the place of human laziness was great. Men shrank from responsibility; uniformity and automatic justice appealed to them. Democracy was a labor-saving device. The meting out of justice by and to individuals was difficult, and took time, and, what was worse, thought. It was much easier to legislate a form of equality, and have done with it—to press a button, have a uniform product, and not bother with hand-made goods.
Not that equality and uniformity were undesirable. The trouble with the popular democratic ideal consisted only in its exaggeration. The democracy of the enthusiastic multitude was an extreme. Aristocracy went to the extreme of inequality and diversity, and democracy went to the extreme of equality and uniformity. Both extremes were vicious; for vices are only exaggerated virtues. And vices are easier than virtue, extremes easier than the golden mean. To proceed on the assumption that all men could be treated as free and equal was easier by far than to recognize and study their inequalities and limitations, and to attempt the best for each individual; but the result was only a vicious approximation.
Let democracy recognize that there were two sides to the shield. The Democrat sympathized with the ignorant and needy, and believed that the more fortunate should make cheerful sacrifice to help them rise. As for himself, he would regulate his conduct among men on the basis of worth, not wealth or blood,
scilicet uni æquus virtuti atque eius amicis,
scilicet uni æquus virtuti atque eius amicis,
and stand ready to obey unselfishly any measure for the common good, however undesirable from his particular point of view. If, however, he demanded sacrifice on the part of the more fortunate in the interest of the masses, hedemanded no less the spirit of sacrifice on the part of the masses for the sake of such of their fellows as gave evidence of superior worth. A democracy should be a great family, in which the sons of promise were gladly helped on their way to honor and usefulness, even at the cost of deprivation and suffering on the part of the rest of the household—as in many an actual family which performed such sacrifice, and rejoiced in it—and by the sacrifice added to its own glory and strength. It should give all its sons and daughters the greatest possible opportunity of self-realization, but never fail to recognize that some selves were more worth realization than others. Whatever was levelled, let it not be intellect or character.
After all, government was a means, not an end. The end was character—individualandnational. A form of government was good or bad as it succeeded or failed to produce that depth and breadth of individual and collective spirit which marked great eras in history—such a spirit as that which made possible the Parthenon or the North Portal of the Erechtheum; or turned back the Armada; or inspired the Italian Risorgimento; or crystallized into the dramas of Shakespeare or Sophocles; or formed the soul of other periods when men were actuated by passionate desire for the common good and common glory, for timeandeternity. The momentary good of the individual—his comfort or enjoyment—was a worthy ideal only in so far as it contributed to character. Without elevation of the ideals of the individual citizen, there could be no great leaders; without great leaders there was no vision, and the people perished.
So it appears that the Democrat's ideal society was somewhere between that of Plato, who thought that, until the union of political power and philosophy in the same person could be effected, there would be no relief, and that in which the Democrat lived, where men were chosen lawmakers and rulers ostensibly because they were good fellows, or at least none of your damned aristocrats.
Some ten or twelve years ago a certain young woman, then fresh from the hands of an esteemed but erratic professor of English literature, wrote a novel the plot of which was roughly as follows. A college graduate suddenly finds himself the inheritor of a shoe factory in a New England town. Filled with the benevolent ideas absorbed in the academic contemplation of economics, he undertakes to introduce profit-sharing with his employees and otherwise to conduct his business for the benefit of the community. So far, good. But hard times follow, and his competitors by lowering wages and reducing labor are able to undersell him. Now there is in his control a considerable sum of money which a widow had entrusted to his father to invest for her, and the question arises whether he shall shut down his mills and inflict suffering upon his men, or shall divert this trust fund to his business and so try to tide over the period of stress. He yields to his sympathies and virtually embezzles the trust fund; but fails nevertheless, and with his own loss brings ruin upon the widow. The story was called "The Burden of Christopher," with the implication that the hero was a bearer of Christ in his misfortune, and the author indicates pretty clearly her sentiment that in surrendering his personal integrity for the expected good of his working people he was following the higher of two conflicting codes of ethics.
The book no doubt has gone its own way to the "limbo large and broad," where the heroes of ancient fiction wander with
Embryoes and idiots, eremits and friars;
Embryoes and idiots, eremits and friars;
but it made a lasting impression on one reader at least, as the first popular presentation to come under his notice of a theory which now confronts him wherever he turns his eyes. There has, in fact, been an astonishing divulgationin the past decade of what is called, with magnificent audacity, the New Morality.
Perhaps the most honored teacher of this code is the mistress of Hull House, who by her devoted life and her services to the people of Chicago in various times of need has won the right to speak with a certain authority for the striving generation of the day. And in one of her books, the "Newer Ideals of Peace," Miss Addams tells of an actual occurrence and infers a moral which points in the same direction as the novel of "Christopher." A family of five children is left motherless. The father, a drunkard, disappears, and the household is left to the care of a feeble old grandmother. Thereupon work is found for the oldest boy, "a fine, manly little fellow" of twelve, who feels keenly "his obligation to care for the family"; but after a time he becomes "listless and indifferent," and at sixteen turns to professional tramping. "It was through such bitter lessons as these," observes Miss Addams, "we learned that good intentions and the charitable impulse do not always work for righteousness." As the story is told there is a plain implication that to find work for a boy under such circumstances is "cruel and disastrous" (her own comment), and that society, and not his own nature, was responsible for his relapse. One would suppose that scarcely an honest workman, or prosperous merchant, or successful professional man had ever taken up the burden of life in youth or childhood. Certainly, hardship and physical waste often result from the demands of life, but there is not a single word in Miss Addams's account to indicate that she has felt the higher need for the future citizen of developing in him a sensitiveness to the peculiar duties that confront him, or has reflected on the moral evil that might have been done the boy if he had been relieved of his natural obligations and his family had been supported by society. "Our democracy," as she says with approval, "is making inroads upon the family, the oldest of human institutions."
This is not an isolated case in Miss Addams's works, nor does it in any wise misrepresent her. In another book, "The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets," the thesis ismaintained and reiterated, that crime is for the most part merely the result of repressing a wholesome "love for excitement" and "desire for adventure." In the year 1909 "there were arrested and brought into court [in Chicago] fifteen thousand young people under the age of twenty, who had failed to keep even the common law of the land. Most of these young people had broken the law in their blundering efforts to find adventure." The inference to be drawn here and throughout the book is that one need only relieve the youth of the land from the necessity of "assuming responsibility prematurely," affording them meanwhile abundant amusement, and the instincts of lawlessness and the pursuit of criminal pleasure will vanish, or almost vanish, of themselves—as if there were no Harry Thaws, and the sons of the rich were all virtuous.
But it must not be supposed that Hull House occupies a place of lonely isolation as the fountain of these ideas. From every self-authorized centre of civic virtue in which a type-writer is at work, the stream proceeds. The very presses groan, as we used to say when those machines were still in the mythological stage, at their labor of supplying the world with the new intellectual pabulum. At this moment there lies before the writer of this article a pile of books, all recently published, which are devoted more or less specifically to the subject, and from all of which, if he had courage to go through them, he might cull abundant examples and quotations. He was, indeed, about to enter this "hollow cave, amid the thickest woods," when, an unvaliant knight, he heard the warning of the lady Una:
Yea but (quoth she) the perill of this placeI better wot then you, though now too lateTo wish you backe returne with foule disgrace,Yet wisedome warnes, whilest foot is in the gate,To stay the steppe, ere forced to retrate.
Yea but (quoth she) the perill of this placeI better wot then you, though now too lateTo wish you backe returne with foule disgrace,Yet wisedome warnes, whilest foot is in the gate,To stay the steppe, ere forced to retrate.
We have in fact to deal with the consummation of a long and deep-seated revolution, and there is no better way to understand the true character of the movement than by turning aside a moment to glance at its historical sources. The attempt to find a new basis of conduct, as wesee it exemplified in the works of Miss Jane Addams and a host of other modern writers, is in fact only one aspect of the slow drift from mediæval religion to humanitarianism. For a thousand years, and well into the second thousand, the ethical feeling of Christian Europe may be said to have taken its color from the saying, "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"—which in extreme cases was interpreted as if it read, If hereformthe whole world; and on the other, kindred saying, "Sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me"—in which the command of charity was held to be not so much for the benefit of the poor as for the liberation of the giver's own soul from the powers of this world. Such was the law, and its binding force was confirmed by the conception of a final day of wrath when the souls of men should stand before a merciless tribunal and be judged to everlasting joy or everlasting torment. The vivid reality of the fear that haunted men, at least in their moments of reflection, may be understood from the vivid horrors of such a picture as Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment," or from the meditations of one of the most genial of English cavaliers. In his little treatise on "Man in Darkness"—appropriate title—Henry Vaughan puts the frank question to himself:
And what madness then is it, for the enjoying of one minute's pleasure for the satisfaction of our sensual corrupt appetite, to lie forever in a bed of burning brass, in the lake of eternal and unquenchable fire? "Suppose," saith the same writer [Drexelius], "that this whole globe of earth were nothing else but a huge mass or mountain of sand, and that a little wren came but once in every thousand years to fetch away but one grain of that huge heap; what an innumerable number of years would be spent before that world of sand could be so fetched away! And yet, alas! when the damned have lain in that fiery lake so many years as all those would amount to, they are no nearer coming out than the first hour they entered in."
And what madness then is it, for the enjoying of one minute's pleasure for the satisfaction of our sensual corrupt appetite, to lie forever in a bed of burning brass, in the lake of eternal and unquenchable fire? "Suppose," saith the same writer [Drexelius], "that this whole globe of earth were nothing else but a huge mass or mountain of sand, and that a little wren came but once in every thousand years to fetch away but one grain of that huge heap; what an innumerable number of years would be spent before that world of sand could be so fetched away! And yet, alas! when the damned have lain in that fiery lake so many years as all those would amount to, they are no nearer coming out than the first hour they entered in."
No doubt practice and precept were at variance then, as to a certain extent they are at all times, and there were many texts in the Bible which might be taken to mitigatethe harsher commands; but such in its purest, highest form was the law, and in the more sensitive minds this conception of the soul naked before a judging God must have created a tremendous anxiety in practice. Morality was obedience and integrity and scorn of the world for an ideal of inner righteousness; it created a sense of individual responsibility for every word and deed; and, say what we will, there was something magnificent in this contempt of the reckoning of other men for that eternal fame which
... lives and speaks aloft by those pure eyes,And perfect witness of all-judging Jove.
... lives and speaks aloft by those pure eyes,And perfect witness of all-judging Jove.
But there was also in this law something repellent and even monstrous. Who has not shuddered with amazement at the inscription which Dante set over the portal of Hell: E 'L PRIMO AMORE? Was it Love that prepared those winding coils of torture to enclose for endless time the vast majority of mankind? Was it even justice to make the everlasting doom of a soul depend on its grasp of truth in these few years spent in a world of shadows and illusions? There is something repulsively irrational in the notion of an unchanging eternity suspended on the action of a moment of time—ex hoc momento pendet æternitas. It should seem to be unthinkable, if it had not actually been thought. As a matter of fact the rigor and crudity of this doctrine had been mitigated in the Middle Ages by the interposition between man and God of the very human institution of the Church with its substitution of temporal penances and pardons, and an interposed Purgatory in place of the terrible paradox of irrevocable judgment. It remained for the Reformation and particularly for the Calvinistic Puritans to tear away those veils of compromise and bring man face to face with the awful abstraction he had created. The result was for a while a great hardening and strengthening of character, salutary indeed after what may be called the almost hypocritical compromise of Catholicism; but in the end human nature could not endure the rigidity of its own logic, and in revolting turned, not to another compromise, but to questioning of the very hypothesis of its faith.
The inevitable reaction from the intolerable logic of the Protestants was Deism, in which God was stript altogether of his judicial and moral attributes and reduced to a kind of immanent, all-benevolent force in nature. "But now comes a modern Sage," says Warburton of Bolingbroke, "... who tells us 'that they made the Basis of Religion far too wide; that men have no further concern withGodthanTO BELIEVE THAT HE IS, which hisphysical Attributesmake fully manifest; but, that he isa rewarder of them who diligently seek him, Religion doth not require us to believe, since this depends on God'sMORAL ATTRIBUTES, of which we have no conception.'" But such a position was manifestly untenable, for it left no place for the undeniable existence of evil in this world and life. From the unaccountable distribution of wrong and suffering the divine had argued the certainty of adjustment in a future state; the deist had flown in the face of facts by retaining the belief in a benevolent Providence while taking from it the power of supernatural retribution; the atheist was more logical, he denied the existence of Providence altogether and turned the universe over to chance or blind law. Such was the progress of thought from Baxter to Bolingbroke and from Bolingbroke to Hume.
The positive consequences of this evolution are written large in the literature of the eighteenth century. With the idea of an avenging deity and a supernatural test there disappeared also the sense of deep personal responsibility; the very notion of a radical and fundamental difference between good and evil was lost. The evil that is apparent in character comes to be regarded merely as the result of the restraining and thwarting institutions of society as these exist—why, no one could explain. Envy and jealousy and greed and the sheer ambition of power, all those traits, which were summed up in the single Greek wordpleonexia,the desire to have more, are not inherent in the human heart, but are artificially introduced by the possession of property and a false civilization. Change these institutions or release the individual entirely from restrictions, and his nature will recoil spontaneously to its natural state of virtue. He needs only follow the impulseof his instinctive emotions to be sound and good. And as a man feels of himself, so he feels of others. There is no real distinction between the good and the evil, but all are naturally good, and the superficial variations we see are caused by the greater or less freedom of development. Hence we should condemn no man, even as we do not condemn ourselves. There is no place for sharp judgment, and the laws which impose penalties and restrictions, and set up false discriminations between the innocent and the criminal, are subject to suspicion, and should be made as flexible as possible. In place of judgment we are to regard all mankind with sympathy, feeling with them a sort of emotional solidarity, the one great virtue, in which are included, or rather sunk, all the law and the prophets. In fine, we have arrived at humanitarianism; humanity has become God.
It was the great work of the eighteenth century, beginning in England and developing in France, to formulate this change, and indoctrinate with it the mind of the unthinking masses. Here is not the place to follow the development in detail, and those who care to see its outcome may be referred to the keen and unjustly neglected chapters in La Harpe's "Lycée" on thephilosophes. To those, indeed, who are acquainted with the philosophical writings that preceded and introduced the French Revolution, the epithet "new" as it is attached to our present-day morality may seem a bit presumptuous, for it would be difficult to find a single fundamental idea in current literature on this subject which could not be closely paralleled by a quotation from Rousseau, or Diderot, or Helvétius, or one of their compeers. Thus, in our exaltation of sympathy above judgment, and of the unrestrained emotions generally as the final rule of character, we are but following Diderot's philosophy of the heart: "Les passions amorties dégradent les hommes extraordinaires"; and when we read in Ellen Key, and a host of other feminist liberators, the apotheosis of love as higher than any divine or human obligations, we are but meeting again with Toussaint's religion a little disguised: "On aime de même Dieu et sa maîtresse." Our revolt from constitutional law as apower imposed by the slower reflection of men upon their own immediate desires and opinions, is essentially the same as the restlessness consecrated by the Frenchéconomistesin the phrase, "le despotisme légal." And, to return whence we began, the economics of Hull House flow only too easily from Helvétius' definition of virtue as "le désir du bien public," and from his more specific statement: "The integrity which is related to an individual or to a small society is not the true integrity; integrity considered in relation to the public is the only kind that really deserves and generally obtains the name."
Miss Addams herself has been disturbed by these reminiscences. Thus she quotes from one of the older humanitarians a characteristic saying: "The love of those whom a man does not know is quite as elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man does know," and repudiates it as vague and impractical beside the New Morality. She ought to know, and may be right; yet it is not easy to see wherein her own ethics are any less vague, when she deplores the act of a boy who goes to work for his starving grandmother because in doing so he is unfitting himself for future service to society. And as for effectiveness, it might seem that the French Revolution was a practical result fairly equivalent in magnitude to what has been achieved by our college settlements. But Miss Addams is by no means peculiar in this assumption of originality. Nothing is more notable in the Humanitarian literature of the day than the feeling that our own age is severed from the past, and opens an entirely new epoch in history. "The race has now crossed the great divide of human history!" exclaims an hysterical doctor of divinity in a book just published. "The tendency of the long past has been towarddiversity, that of the longer future will be towardoneness. The change in this stream of tendency is not a temporary deviation from its age-long course—a new bend in the river. It is an actual reversal of the current, which beyond a peradventure will prove permanent." To this ecstatic watcher, the sudden reversal took place at no remote date, but yesterday; and by a thousand other watchers the same miracle is vociferously heralded.Beyond a peradventure! Not a little of this flattering assumption is due to the blind and passionate hope of the human heart clamoring against the voice of experience from similar and different movements in the past, which have somehow failed to renovate the world. So many prophets before now have cried out, looking at the ever-flowing current of time, and having faith in some Thessalian magic: