Such serious and remote but I trust illuminating aspectsof our topic may merely be glanced at. In closing I may note that while the finest exhibitions of tact arise between individuals or in small groups, there is also a collective type of tact which must be mastered by the artist, the actor, and the orator. St. Paul manifested it in the highest degree when he addressed the curious Babists, Vedantists, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, Vitalists, Relativists, and Materialists (my Greek has lapsed so I offer modern equivalents) of Athens as men "pre-eminently religious." And it is characteristic of the touch and go quality of every sort of tact that nothing much moved the loiterers on Mars Hill except the Apostle's beginning. Need I add that tact itself loyally obeys the law of measure and occasion which it imposes on its subservient material? The high exercise of tact requires high occasions. Of this sort was John Hancock's grim and enlightening jest in the Continental Congress on all hanging together lest they all hang separately. It took perhaps a singularly tactless personality to husband this supreme and isolated flash for a lifetime until the right occasion should occur. Merely one among countless examples of Lincoln's tact was his solicitous inquiry as to the brand of Grant's whiskey when a meddler brought gossip of the great General's potations. Charles II's famous apology for unconscionable delay in dying is frequently cited as a consummate example of tact. To me it seems merely witty, containing as it does a hint that the attendants had let something of impatience or weariness transpire.
It is the negative part of tact always to save at least two faces—leaving neither party to a transaction discomforted. The most solemn example of entire tactlessness within my knowledge was perpetrated by a very learned man, the by no means inconspicuous father of a far more famous son, Dr. John Rubens. During a prolonged absence of that rather unsatisfactory husband, William of Orange, Dr. John deeply engaged the volatile affections of Queen Anna. When the affair was uncovered he wrote to the Prince a letter of apology, the tenor of which was that such infelicities had been the common lot of monarchs, as history showed, and the present mishap was themore tolerable that he himself, Dr. John Rubens, was a man of parts and station, a Doctor of Laws from no mean university, and at court the equal of a baron. It does not appear that such plain intimation that the queen might have erred with some base fellow, perhaps a mere Bachelor of Arts, in any way comforted the taciturn Prince. When Dr. Rubens left prison it was not because of this letter but through the importunity of a singularly loyal wife. To emphasize the relativity of tact let me cite a family anecdote, the appositeness of which must condone a certain lack of reticence in its telling. My father once in conducting a defence before a magistrate, by directing a single crucial question to the plaintiff put him overtly in the wrong, and noting the judge's involuntary nod of assent, rested the case, promptly obtaining a favorable verdict. As regards the judge this was perfect tact, but not as regards the client. He rightly expected a more ample parade of professional skill and probably still grudges the fee.
How much needless travail and fuss a truly reticent and tactful man might spare himself and his neighbors—privacies profaned, trifling misunderstandings magnified, maimed reputations, distracted aims, thwarted accomplishment! Upon all this I could still enlarge, but I am already rebuked by the ambiguously smiling shade of Samuel Butler of "Erewhon" who remarks in his "Notebooks:"
"No man should try even to allude to the greater part of what he sees in his subject, and there is hardly a limit to what he may omit. What is required is that he shall say what he elects to say discreetly, that he shall be quick to see the gist of a matter, and give it pithily without either prolixity or stint of words."
Mr. Bunn of Bloomington, Illinois, has put into a book the story how in 1860 he went up to Mr. Lincoln's room in the State House of Illinois, and met Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, just coming down. Mr. Bunn said to Mr. Lincoln:
"You don't want to put that man into your cabinet."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because he thinks he is a great deal bigger than you are."
"Well, do you know of any other men who think they are bigger than I am?"
"I do not know that I do. Why do you ask?"
"Because I want to put them all in my cabinet!"
Perhaps that was the principle that President Wilson went on when he invited Mr. Bryan to be secretary of state. The objection of prudent on-lookers to Mr. Bryan as a member of Mr. Wilson's cabinet was very much Mr. Bunn's objection to Chase. But Lincoln took Chase, and also Seward and Stanton to whom the same objection applied, and Wilson took Bryan.
That argued confidence in something. Maybe it was a confidence in some qualities and convictions of Mr. Bryan; in his sincerity, and his loyalty to some aims that Mr. Wilson wished his administration to express. Or it might have been a token of Mr. Wilson's confidence in himself and his political intentions. But in the case of no other cabinet officer did that sort of confidence find that sort of expression. Not one of the rest of them would be picked out as a man who thought himself a bigger man than Wilson. Except perhaps Mr. Lane, they were all fairly green hands with almost everything to learn about the business of conducting the federal government. Mr. Redfield and Mr. Burleson had been in Congress, but none of them had ever been a conspicuous figure in national politics.
They were not inexperienced men. Mr. McAdoo hadhad experience as a practicing lawyer and as president of the company that financed, built, and operated the first tube under the Hudson River. Mr. McReynolds had been assistant attorney-general, and had been long retained afterwards by the Department of Justice in matters relating to enforcement of the anti-trust law, especially in the prosecution of the tobacco cases. He was known and respected as a competent lawyer. Mr. Garrison had been a newspaper reporter and had held a judicial office in New Jersey. Dr. Houston was a specialist in economics, had been president of two universities, and came to Washington fresh from the work of reorganizing and developing the important Washington University of St. Louis. Mr. Daniels had once been chief clerk of the Department of the Interior, and afterwards a successful newspaper editor and publisher in North Carolina and a member of the Democratic national committee. Mr. Lane, drafted from the Interstate Commerce Commission, was a man of excellent ability, had had a very valuable experience in governmental concerns, and was probably the best equipped for his new work of any of the President's official family. And Mr. Burleson and Mr. Redfield, as said, had been members of Congress. But not one of these gentlemen was in the enjoyment of a national renown. Mr. Bryan had all of that that there was in the new cabinet. Indeed Mr. Bryan had dominated the party so long and so little to the liking of the older leaders of the Democrats, that, except in the South, few other of the abler politicians of the party had been able to keep in the public sight. Everybody knew Judge Parker, but he, though a loyal Democrat, was not conclusively consecrated to the cause of the New Freedom, and it was not expected that he would be in the Cabinet. Governor Harmon was well known and perhaps more available, but, so far as known, he was not invited. Mr. Underwood, with the work of making a new tariff law cut out for him, was indispensable in his place as leader of the House, and could not be disturbed. Mr. Clark, the speaker, was in a like case, too well off where he was, to be moved. So the new cabinet was nearly all new timber, and not only new but fairly green. The President, itseemed, new himself to the business of directing government, had assembled a group of assistants that seemed all to be in a like case, and they would all start in together to learn their new business.
It worried some observers to see such untried hands on the levers of government. "The Unfermented Cabinet" Mr. Bryan's notions of diplomatic dinners have led some of them to call it, and a great deal of space has been given up in the public prints since March to its processes of fermentation. Observers have watched them with great curiosity, also with amusement, also at times with anxiety. It has been a matter of importance to the country what sort of a council the fermentation would produce; what manner of men these councillors and assistants of the President would turn out to be, and with how much efficiency they would finally adjust themselves to their important duties. There were forecasts a-plenty; frequent prophecies in particular of the speedy separation of Mr. Bryan from the official family. There have been wild cries to the President from newspapers claiming to be influential, to discharge this or that one,—Mr. McReynolds because of an apparent error of judgment about a prosecution in California; Mr. McAdoo for something else; Mr. Bryan for official inefficiency and unofficial activity; others for other reasons. But the cabinet still holds together as it began, and is still apparently harmonious, and its fermentation still goes on.
The underlying idea about the fermentation has been that when it had accomplished its work, the novelties of method and deportment peculiar to Mr. Wilson's administration would fade out, his heads of Departments would behave more and more like their predecessors, and the business of government would gradually conform to the conventions that obtained when the new hands took hold. Now the country has been kept so busy watching its new President that it has not been able to give more than a broken attention to his secretaries, and only the more obstreperous of them have been much under scrutiny. But it has been impossible to overlook Mr. Bryan, and it cannot be said that in his case there is yet any sign thatfermentation is producing the expected result. He has been all along, and continues up to latest advices to be, impressively different from anyone who ever sat before in the chief seat in the State Department. No one before him set grape juice before ambassadors at his dinner-table; no one before him went out on the lecture platform to supplement his official salary, thereby combining a particularly ostentatious form of money-getting with the duties of the leading place in the cabinet. Secretary Bryan has been very widely and enthusiastically criticised for these departures from tradition, but that does not seem to have troubled him in the least. Why should it? For nearly twenty years he has been an object of criticism for about two-thirds of his countrymen and has flourished under it because the other third liked him. To about two-thirds of the Democratic party he was acceptable as a candidate. To the other third and to the Republicans he was not acceptable and therefore he could never be elected President. But a third of the voters and the people they represent count up to thirty millions of people, and that is a good many. It is a valuable following for a politician, a very valuable collection for a lecturer. To the thirty million, ambassadors are a good deal of a joke, and they are amused to have grape juice set before these dignitaries. More than that some of them are gratified because they consider grape juice a moral beverage, and consider it exemplary to offer it to exalted personages who ought to want it, though they don't. And doubtless a great many people are delighted to welcome Mr. Bryan on the lecture platform. They like that sort of intercourse with a high officer of government. Is it nottheirgovernment? Is it nottheirsecretary? And he is a fine performer too! Clap! clap! come their echoing palms together and freely drop their dollars into the hat. Why, to be sure, should Mr. Bryan forsake the practices that please all the thirty million friends to whose favor he owes his present preferment, to please fastidious persons who never have believed in him and never will?
It is not to be denied that Mr. Bryan has nerve. There are those who complain because President Wilson hasnot admonished him to be more modish in his deportment. But President Wilson has been very busy, and has needed the help of Mr. Bryan and his thirty million admirers, and apparently has had it. There is concurrence of report that Mr. Bryan has been very loyal and very useful to the administration. A man with thirty million friends can be quite helpful to a President, or can be quite troublesome. To leave such a person to follow, under the law, the promptings of his own spirit in matters of taste, seems no more than a reasonable discretion.
And there is another view that may be taken of Mr. Bryan's Chautauqua orations. He likes to talk to the people. He does it very successfully. His ability to do it had been the chief source of his strength. The great newspapers of the country are pretty generally hostile to him. If he has something to say, his preference for saying it with his own voice rather than to have it filtered through more or less hostile newspapers, may be understood. Our newspapers have not, collectively, a high reputation for giving accurate reports of the public utterances of public men. Any contemporary politician who has a loud enough voice and sufficient physical energy in using it to make him in any measure independent of newspapers will have considerable, intelligent public sympathy in his reliance on his own gifts, and a desire to keep them exercised.
But there is something more than Mr. Bryan's thirty million (estimated) friends to keep the President harmonious with him. He is very considerably harmonious in spirit and political desires with the President. They have a very inclusive identity of general purpose. Mr. Bryan is as heartily in favor of the New Freedom as Mr. Wilson is. That is a kind of political religion in which both of them have profound faith. What truly religious people differ about, as a general thing, is not the controlling facts of their faith, but less essential matters; side issues, and very often errors. Catholics and Protestants have always agreed as to the main and really important facts of Christianity, but they have fought ferociously about processes, mechanisms and details. Free silver was a detail of politics. Mr. Bryan led his faction into the wilderness aboutthat. Government ownership of railroads is another detail; state insurance of bank deposits is another. Mr. Bryan has an unsurpassed gift of getting it wrong on his details, but in his great general aim to keep the great body of people free from domination by the strong hands he is probably sound and sincere. It must be that that has saved him alive. He is a bold man with a large voice and the habit of domination. He hates bosses who are in politics for purposes of plunder; he hates all the agencies that seem to him to purpose to monopolize the people's heritage—trusts because he thinks they want to monopolize business, "Wall Street" because he thinks it wants to monopolize money, Ryan and Tammany because he thinks they want to monopolize and commercialize politics. Of course Mr. Bryan is interested in Bryan, and is heartily for that statesman, but he seems also to be quite heartily for human liberty, the rights of man, peace in the world, and the greatest happiness of the most people. It really looks as if he cared so much for these perennial enthusiasms as to be willing if they cannot come through himself, to help them come through someone else. And it looks as though he thought they might come considerably through Mr. Wilson, and was working to make them do it. Mr. Bryan's ethics are good enough. It is his economics that have made the trouble. He behaves as if at last he had found someone who could show him how to do what he wanted done. He seems to see in Mr. Wilson a man who is moving in the direction he wants to go and knows the road. He never before had leadership of that kind offered to him. All the other eminent Democratic guides whom he has been invited to support have seemed to him to be merely persons who knew the road to something he wished to avoid.
Confidence is a great harmonizer. If you think a man is going your way and knows the road better than you do, it is no great hardship to go along with him. The chief result that has come to notice of the fermentation, so far, in President Wilson's cabinet is an impression of profound confidence of the cabinet in the President. So far as heard from, they all seem to feel that he is going their way andeither knows the road or can find it. It will be recalled that at Princeton Mr. Wilson was not so successful in winning the confidence of his advisers. That was because a certain proportion of them were not going his way. It has come to be recognized that he is of no use to anybody who is not going in the same general direction as he is. He will stop and talk; will persuade if he can; will wait if necessary, but he seems to have a prejudice against deviation that reminds one of Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress. You may pave a road with gold bricks; grade it, smooth it, dust it; it will never look attractive to Mr. Wilson unless it leads where he wants to go. That is the impression he makes,—an impression of a stubborn man very tenacious of purposes very well thought out. One laughs to think of the heads that are still sore with trying to butt him out of his course at Princeton; of his rapid extrication of his interests from political ties the most intimate and useful, that threatened to give an impression that his feet were intangled! One laughs to think of theWorlda few months ago using its editorial megaphone to order him to discharge three members of his cabinet. It is doubtful if theWorldwould be so ready with that kind of suggestion to-day.
Nine months of fermentation have left the cabinet considerably clarified. We begin to think of it less as an aggregation of individuals, and more as a team bent on putting over certain definite accomplishments in government. It seems united in spirit; a team of willing workers under a captain in whom they have not only confidence, but pride. It was expected that Mr. Wilson would be hard to work with. It was expected that his defect as an executive officer would be an inability to enlist the sympathy of his colleagues and subordinates. People said he had no magnetism, that he was over suspicious and distrustful: that he would not dare to tie up to anyone, and that no one would dare to tie up to him. But, so far, these expectations do not find much support; in fact, so far as anybody knows, his cabinet is an unusually happy family. Men are working with tireless devotion to make his administration succeed. They are doing so not so much becausethey like the man (though they do like him) as because they like the cause. They follow him, support him, help him, advise him, defer to his judgment, because he has impressed them with the notion that he knows what he is about, and is equal to what he undertakes and that under his leadership certain definite improvements in the social and economic apparatus of our country may be accomplished.
Soldiers love a general not because of how he parts his hair, but because he can win battles. President Wilson has produced the impression that he can win battles. It is that that interests him; not the buttons on his coat, nor to have the people holler when they see him. He cannot win any battle without plenty of help. How does he get the help? Is it by close attention to details of deportment?
Not at all. His deportment is agreeable so far as known, but it does not seem to be his chief concern.
Is it by extreme solicitude to avoid small mistakes and ingratiate all influential persons?
No. He makes his share of small mistakes and sometimes scandalizes the influential, but it does not seem to matter.
He gets help because he seems to be worth helping; because he gives his mind not to the retention of power, but to the use of it in accomplishing what he was chosen to accomplish. He has signed a tariff bill. That was one great battle won. He had to have splendid support to win it, but he got the support. Has he rested on that victory? Not a minute. Now it is the currency bill and it will be that until he signs a currency bill that will satisfy the country. Then it will be the trusts, and the Lord knows what.
But it is safe to bet that Mr. Wilson also knows what. He has thought out a great many problems of government. He will always know of things that ought to be done to improve the life of the people, and he will always have a program for doing the next thing on his list, and will always push it as hard as seems to him practicable and, probably, much harder than will seem expedient to most observers. He has shown himself to be a great driving force, and thekind of one that gains ground because of the forces that he can carry with him. What he is after will always be as clear as he can make it, and it will be important, and those that are for it will be confident that they will get it if they win, and those that are against it will know what they are against. There is a good prospect for clean political and economic issues in this country for some time to come; issues about which people will have to think, and on which they will divide. The question is going to be how much improvement the country can stand in a given time. The patient is on the operating table. No doubt he needs to have a good deal done, but if his pulse begins to sink, off he will have to come, and wait until he gets stronger. Otherwise the disposition is to make a new man of him and do it now.
And so, small matters are not going to make so much difference as they might if less important changes were imminent. It may be true that the trousers of all the cabinet bag at the knees, but nobody cares much. Mr. Bryan may talk in the Chautauqua circuit, and do lots of other unusual things, Mr. McAdoo's department may make mistakes in its income-tax circulars, Mr. Daniels may behave at times too much like Mr. Daniels, Mr. McReynolds's young men may show a too voluble zeal in prosecution, but it will be a mistake to expand occurrences of that size into evidences of administrative failure. Cromwell had a wart on his nose, but still was esteemed an efficient man. His trousers would undoubtedly have bagged at the knees if he had worn trousers, but his statue stands at last by the Parliament House in London.
President Wilson's administration is likely to win or lose on wagers of considerable size. It may be a good administration or it may be a bad one, but there is no sign or symptom that it is going to be a piker.
The American people in their frugal rural days enjoyed their freedom, knew all their neighbors, and governed themselves simply and directly. They knew personally the men they elected. Now bosses govern them, and the men they elect are unknown to the voters. The republic is rich, the people are many. Still possessed of that spirit of liberty which Edmund Burke noted as characteristic of the American colonists, and still reaching for complete self-government, they have grasped too much, and have lost their grip on what is essential. They have seen the setting up of secret oligarchies in all the chief cities and states. The head of the most considerable of these oligarchies, regnant save in times of extraordinary protest and agitation, is virtually king of a tributary city and state, whose population is over thrice that of the original thirteen Colonies, whose public expenditures are three hundred millions of dollars yearly, and whose wealth amounts to twenty-five billions. He and his associates, too, partake of this fierce American spirit, in the sense that they are strong individualists. And they are captains of a peculiar industry.
The fathers foresaw this danger to the republic. Judah Hammond says that Washington, before the close of his second term, "rebuked self-creative societies from an apprehension that their ultimate tendency would be hostile to the public tranquillity." The members of the Society of Tammany, who were then celebrating its eighth birthday, "supposed their institution to be included in the reproof, and they almost all forsook it." But the organization's founder, William Mooney, and a few with him, made Aaron Burr their leader, and he and his friend Matthew L. Davis forged it and tempered it into an instrument of perpetual and public plunder.
It was inevitable that there should be "self-creative societies" in the United States devoted to the political preferment and personal emolument of their members. Itaccorded with the genius of a people who wished, above all things, individually to be let alone in their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Vast natural possessions must be explored and exploited. The victorious new nation was engaged in ravaging a bountiful land and in despoiling its savage possessors. To the spirit of liberty which its citizens inherited as Englishmen and as sons of dissidence and protestantism, was added a contagion of wildness from their redskin foes. The "Burrites" paraded in Indian garb, danced, and used savage ceremonies. The climate, changeable and stimulating, and the conditions of the time, charged with the possibilities of material and political conquest, had bred desperate leaders differing from the patriots who headed the societies of the Revolution. These leaders naturally opposed the party of Alexander Hamilton, with its suggestions of a responsible, centralized, and controlling government. The Society of old Tamenund welcomed Aaron Burr into its wigwam after he slew Hamilton. It shielded its founder, Mooney, after he was convicted for stealing "wampum," or "trifles for Mrs. Mooney," from New York City's supplies. It acclaimed Benjamin Romaine as its Grand Sachem, after his removal in 1806 from the City Controllership for malfeasance. Abraham Stagg, political ancestor of Charles F. Murphy, continued to get the contracts for paving the city's streets after his conviction, in 1808, of concealing accounts as Collector of Assessments. Tammany's braves assaulted the City Hall in 1815 and removed the Mayor, DeWitt Clinton, who was the honest and better prototype of William Sulzer; but Clinton later repelled their attack on him as Governor. Under Matthew Davis they had early perfected their mode of raiding the primaries that they might consequently raid the City Treasury, and in 1800 their manipulations actually resulted in the election of President Jefferson. Their councils were so crafty that by 1816 they were ruling New York by a committee of fourteen chieftains. In his excellent history of Tammany Hall, Gustavus Myers says:
Substantially, fourteen men were acting for over five thousand Republican voters, and eight members of the fourteen composeda majority. Yet the system had all the pretence of a pure democracy; the wards were called upon to elect delegates; the latter chose candidates and made party rules; and the "great popular meeting" accepted or rejected nominees; it all seemed to spring directly from the people.
Substantially, fourteen men were acting for over five thousand Republican voters, and eight members of the fourteen composeda majority. Yet the system had all the pretence of a pure democracy; the wards were called upon to elect delegates; the latter chose candidates and made party rules; and the "great popular meeting" accepted or rejected nominees; it all seemed to spring directly from the people.
Thus early was formed the perfect and predatory "system" which typifies the oligarchies that have acquired control of the American states and cities. Their forays and assaults have been continuous through more than a century. Now and then a warrior, chief, or Sachem has been captured with his booty and punished. Such were the cases of the treasury stealings by Ruggles Hubbard and John L. Broome in 1817; of Jacob Barker and his fellow Sachems in the bank frauds of 1826; of the procurement of legislative charters by bribery in 1834, involving Peter Betts and Luke Metcalfe; of the lobbying by Samuel Swartout for the Harlem Railroad in 1835, and his defalcations in 1838; of the Manhattan Bank's lendings to Tammany leaders in 1840; of the gambler Rynders and the Empire Club scandal in 1844; of the sales of nominations under Fernando Wood in 1846, and the Council of the "Forty Thieves" in 1851; of the extortions for ferry leases and railroad franchises in 1854; of the election frauds of 1857, and so on, down to the monumental thieveries of "Boss" Tweed and his "ring," exposed in 1871, the death of "Honest" John Kelly in 1886, the rise of Richard Croker in 1890, who testified that he worked "for his pocket all the time," and to Murphy, who in 1913 displayed the supreme power of Tammany by bringing about the removal of William Sulzer from the Governorship for disobeying the "invisible government." These exposures merely punctuate a long history of sustained and systematic plunder, for a parallel with which we must go back to the times of the Medici and the oligarchy they reared above the fabric of the Florentine republic.
But the rule of thieves, corruptionists, and "machine" men, which must be acknowledged as nearly universal in the United States, a rule which makes it impossible for the people to select their own candidates for office, and usually dictates the elections, is strangely the price the public paysfor social and economic freedom. It was the intent of the founders that the people should control their own government. The founders made it as nearly a pure democracy as they dared. The charters of American cities and the constitutions of the states reveal long lists of elective offices. The statutes define strictly the duties of officials; their terms are made short, and through the multitude of offices, important and petty, it is clear that one purpose runs to make each directly answerable to the voters. In every quadrennial cycle the voters of New York City engage in the election of over five hundred incumbents of offices, state and municipal. Tickets with candidates for thirty offices in a single election are of normal length, and between the rival candidates on four or five such tickets each voter is expected intelligently to make his selection. If he makes it intelligently, the officials elected will be fit; if he understands their duties, and can spare time to watch their conduct while he observes the behavior of several score other officials whose terms have not yet expired, he can punish those who are unfaithful, and reward those who show themselves worthy of public trust. But to carry on an efficient government in this way, most of the voters would have to leave their private pursuits, abandon the opportunities of a great and rich country, and give their minds chiefly to the complex administrations of all the public offices. Will they do it? Can they?
The voters, the least and most intelligent of them, all know that it is impracticable to leave their private pursuits, to which they devote time and energy unsparingly, and attend in this way to the government. The very method the people have provided to secure the offices under their direct control defeats its purpose by the amount of work and study it entails. No owner of a large business establishment would pretend that he could judge the qualifications ofallhis employees and know their work, yet this ability to assure good service in the great business establishment of government, is presumed in every voter. The presumption is as distinguished for its foolishness as for its age. It has not been well founded in a century, during which time it has been repeatedly proved false.Most elections go by default. Excepting in the cases of a few conspicuous candidates, about whom the public can make itself informed, and in small communities where everyone knows his neighbor and the men in petty offices, the electorate obeys mechanically the dictates of political leaders.
The notion of having most offices elective, originated, of course, in the practice of the old New England town meetings. But as the towns grew into cities, and these increased in population, the public works expanded, public interests and activities became complex, and the number of offices and instruments of government was multiplied, each with its peculiar responsibilities. The private concerns of the voters, likewise, acquired a complexity that made extra demands on their attention, and the trades and professions became specialized. The people could no longer rule themselves by any method resembling that of the town meeting. As they developed their unexampled opportunities, their eyes were diverted from the multitude of public offices, and the plunderers came in.
The politicians were devoted. They dedicated the time the voters could not spare to holding together the complicated public machinery. The people could not very well go to the primaries; that should be the business of the bosses, their bread and butter. They do their work at least zealously. They are called traitors and plunderers, many hate them, but perforce everybody tolerates them, and the states and cities under the present system cannot do without them. Their low organizations, their dives and groggeries, their gangs of "floaters" and intimidators of voters, their levyings of tribute, their control of men in high places, their sales of power and patronage, and their gigantic thefts and corruption show only in its perverse working that fierce individualistic spirit which is in freer play here and now among all ranks of men, and in all pursuits, than elsewhere in the world during the course of human history.
To say that the influence of such men, self-constituted governors of the public for their own private interest, has been pernicious beyond their immediate stealings and"honest graft," would be saying too little. The people in their local governments, which are closer to their lives and in the aggregate more important than the national government, have not had the equal protection of the laws. Under the bosses, legislatures were for sale, and sold. The corporations got their public franchises by bribery. Vast insurance funds were juggled in speculation. The necessaries of life were monopolized. Wholesale adulteration of foods and medicines was permitted. Refrigerated meats were kept for higher prices until ptomaines were produced. Unsafe buildings were erected. The boss, in whose power was the enforcement of laws, could instruct the aldermen or the legislators not to appropriate money for their enforcement. He could bargain for the passage of unwise or oppressive statutes, and he could instruct judges, appointed to their candidacies by him, how to interpret them. Had his influence extended only to the heads of lawless trusts, it might have been less dangerous than it was and is. But it was pervasive, it infected the common people. They saw the laws unequally administered, and a general contempt for law was bred. Dr. Fritz Reichmann, Superintendent of Weights and Measures at Albany, recently calculated that petty tradesmen cheated New York's consumers with short measures by at least $10,000,000 yearly. Raids upon the small groceries and shops of Greater New York during a reform administration, disclosed false weights and measures in the majority of them. Here was evidence that the fabric of the body politic had been warped and wrenched from the standards of individual rectitude.
Fortunately, signs are not lacking of what has been called a great moral awakening. Taking advantage of the Federal system at Washington, which is based upon the theory that the boss shall be selected by the people and placed in the Presidency by them, appointing heads of all the subordinate offices, the people have through the Presidents caused the dissolution of great monopolies, and have made the business of captaining industries by unfair means disreputable. The industrial captains are no longer satisfied with their material gains. They want the respectof their fellows. They are reforming their bad companies or forsaking them, and are devoting their wealth to public ends. One of the states has greatly aided in this change, and its example is instructive. New Jersey, the "home of the trusts," notorious throughout the world for its fathering of monopolies, is in all but its legislature a "short ballot" state. The legislators are elected at large by counties; the ballot is long in the thickly populated urban counties, and the unfair representation of the rural counties unites with the city bosses to control the law-making power, usually, also, dictating the nominations for Governor. But the Governorship of New Jersey is practically the only office to be filled by the people's vote. Like the President at Washington the Governor appoints his own cabinet and the rest of the state's executive and judicial officers. New Jersey's pre-eminence as the home of the trusts was gained after the nomination of Governor after Governor by the bosses.
In the Fall of 1910 New Jersey's bosses overreached themselves. Ex-Senator James Smith and his nephew "Jim" Nugent, chairman of the Democratic State Committee, saw an opportunity to defeat the Republicans, who were in power, by the nomination of Woodrow Wilson, then President of Princeton University. The New Jersey Democracy adopted a platform which bore the impress of Mr. Wilson's style and principles, and it gave to a great citizen a great opportunity for service. He at once proclaimed his independence of his political creators. He said that if elected Governor he would act as leader of his party. He became, in fact, a leader among many able Governors in a series of harmonious reforms for which the inspiration came from within the States. But ex-Governor Pennypacker of Pennsylvania, who was a creature of the boss system, accused Mr. Wilson of becoming the "most arrogant boss of them all when he got to be Governor." James Smith, shorn of his power, remarked:
New Jersey is unlike any other State in the Union. It elects very few of its officials. Nearly all of them are named by the Governor. He has about two hundred appointees, whose salaries range from $2,000 to $15,000 a year. Among theseappointees are Judges, and other places that carry a great deal of influence with them. The method gives the Governor a chance to build up a system—which is something which I believe I was charged with having, and of which I have recently been deprived.
New Jersey is unlike any other State in the Union. It elects very few of its officials. Nearly all of them are named by the Governor. He has about two hundred appointees, whose salaries range from $2,000 to $15,000 a year. Among theseappointees are Judges, and other places that carry a great deal of influence with them. The method gives the Governor a chance to build up a system—which is something which I believe I was charged with having, and of which I have recently been deprived.
No more significant utterance had been made in a century of American politics. Governor Wilson rose immediately to the full stature of his powers. He carried out his platform pledges, appealing to public opinion in the passage through a hostile legislature of laws reforming the conduct of elections, making employers liable for the injuries of workmen, restricting campaign expenses and requiring that they be published before elections, creating a public utilities commission, regulating the cold storage of foods, permitting cities to adopt governments by the short ballot, and preventing the grant of charters to monopolistic companies. He drove through a body of reform legislation such as had never been seen on New Jersey's statute books, eclipsing the record of a generation. He defeated Boss Smith's candidacy for re-election to the United States Senate, both because he was a boss and because as one of the "Senators from Havemeyer" in 1894, Smith had betrayed the principles of the Wilson tariff bill and President Cleveland's program for tariff reduction. Wilson became a "veto Governor," disposing of 150 bills invading home rule, or reckless of debts, which were dumped on him in the closing days of his first legislative session, and which were carelessly drawn. And he fulfilled his pledge to comply with the Civil Service rules in making all appointments. His acceptance of the National Democratic nomination to the Presidency in 1912 resulted in his becoming the head of a "short ballot" nation.
President Wilson, like many of his predecessors at the National capital, is vindicating the principle of the short ballot. The state bosses have often invaded the Federal legislature and government, but in comparison with their control of state machines they have never got very far. The national party machines are made up of local fragments. But their nominating machinery, which has such an inevitable and disastrous influence on local elections,is concentrated upon the three offices of President, Senator, and Representative, all of which are of primary concern to the voters. The national candidates must conform to higher standards than local candidates, because they are few, conspicuous, and known of all their constituencies. In this fact may be seen the controlling reason why, while the local governments have everywhere been taken by the bosses from the hands of the people, the Federal system is still theirs.
Despite the brilliant and recent example of New Jersey, handicapped as she is by a long-ballot legislature organized on the bi-cameral principle, and despite the continuing example of successive administrations at Washington, it is nevertheless hard for the alarmed electorates of the states to give up their old direct-election, town-meeting ideals. The representative system has failed, they say. They should see that it has failed because of its weight of machinery, necessitated by the number of elective offices. But the tendency is marked toward discarding the representative principle at the primaries, and making it the duty of the people to nominate as well as elect directly to the many offices. That adds to the work of each voter, which is already, and confessedly, too great. Tear down representative government; away with the system of electing delegates at the primaries; let us nominate as well as vote for each candidate ourselves—that is the principle of the direct primary bills which have acquired the force of statutes in the western states, and are being agitated in the east. It is but natural that the people should be enraged at the manipulation of primaries by the politicians. To do away with delegates and conventions is their first impulse. Certainly the delegates elected, and the conventions held, are injurious to good government. But the principle of representation by the best qualified men of the electorate is not impaired. The establishment of the direct primary makes necessary two campaigns instead of one, necessitates a new equipment of political machinery, and doubles the distraction of the people by the many offices they must fill. They do not yet see that fewer and more responsible offices would bring abler candidates into thefield, that public opinion might be concentrated upon their choosing by delegates in conventions, and on their intelligent election at the polls.
The constitutional amendment submitted last Fall to the voters of Ohio, providing fewer elective offices and centering in the Executive the power of appointment to all lesser posts, was opposed on the ground that it would take authority from the people. Governor Cox was accused of trying to be king. He might well have pointed to Washington, which has had its "kingship" since the foundation of the republic. Governor Glynn of New York, who needed advice and counsel after the impeached Sulzer left the capitol, held cabinet meetings with the Secretary of State, the Attorney-General, Comptroller, State Treasurer, and State Engineer and Surveyor. Unlike President Wilson's cabinet, these men had been appointed, not by the Chief Executive, but by the party machines, whose leaders foresaw that they would be voted blindly into office. Officials whom the public did not know had the spending of millions in party patronage. To them the new Governor was constrained to look for support. In theory the Chief Executive, he had to work through agents who might be hostile to his purposes. Through such officers Mr. Murphy had extended his power throughout the state, and his contractors were beneficiaries of the millions wasted upon ill-constructed highways and canals.
How to dispense with the cumbersome political machinery that has oppressed the local elections as the needs of the increasing population became more complex, is a chief problem of these times. The bosses have, indeed, prepared the way for its solution. It is necessary for the people to recognize that the bosses' unofficial work should be placed in the hands of responsible executive officials, and thus changed from its private ends to public uses. The unskilled committees of citizens formed during times of public agitation and revolt may occasionally defeat the machines of more skilled politicians, but their triumphs are short-lived, and the reform administrations are often unsatisfactory. Public spirit abounds, it grapples withenormous difficulties. The chief difficulty now is in a lack of apprehension of the chief source of the public's troubles.
The smaller cities are leading in the fundamental reform. Nearly three hundred of them have adopted the short ballot in charters that confer government by commission. Each of the commissioners, usually five in number, focuses public attention on his headship of a municipal department, and the five make most or all of the appointments. The states, likewise, are beginning to follow the lead of New Jersey. Ohio has granted its cities the option of government by commissioners, and has started to prune the list of state elective offices. California is heading in the same direction, for it has made appointive its state printer, three railroad commissioners, and clerk of the supreme court. In New York it is sought to make the Governor's "cabinet" appointive, as well as the state judiciary, which compares ill with the judiciary of other states, such as New Jersey and Massachusetts, where the judges are appointed by the Governor. The Supreme Court of the United States, whose judges are appointed by the President for life, has won the respect of high juridical authorities for its ability, probity, and learning, in which it endures comparison with the greatest European courts of last resort. A reduction of the legislatures into single bodies has been advocated, notably by Governor Hodges of Kansas. The legislatures with two chambers have not worked to the ends of deliberation, but the contrary. The progress of measures has been obscured in them until the closing days of their sessions, when there are "jammed through" questionable acts that have never met the public gaze until their enactment. New York has its legislative members apportioned by districts, which, if reduced to fifty for a single chamber, would be approved by advocates of the short ballot. Deliberation might then be had by requiring a certain interval of time between introduction of bills and their final passage, after revision by skilled drafters. The county governments, also, need overhauling, relegating the sheriffs, county clerks, registers, surrogates, and district attorneys to the appointivelists. As for the cities, the tendency is to fix responsibility in the Mayor or a commission.
The multiplied elective offices have come by evolution. As the needs of the body politic increased more of them were created, with developed and specialized functions. They were made elective because the people were jealous of their own control, anxious to select their representatives, and to make them responsive to their will. The people are now more eager and persistent in their purpose of having a really representative government than at any previous time in the national history. They occasionally seize control of their complex machinery, and for a time succeed in running it. But they are beginning to see that the levers they throw must be fewer, though more powerful. Gradually, by the reluctant assent of legislatures submitting to the force of public opinion well led, or more rapidly and comprehensively in constitutional conventions guided by the enlightened and patriotic wills of public-spirited revisers, the change to a government of a few elected executives with large appointive powers will be wrought. The unchartered freedom of the private oligarchies will yield to the restraints imposed by the people through their instructed heads.
The erudite Dr. Burton in hisAnatomy of Melancholyrefers to the plant nicotiana as "divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosophers' stones." It is the purpose of this article to study the social cost and the social advantage of this divine commodity in the United States, for the purpose of framing a rough and necessarily incomplete balance sheet, which will bring into juxtaposition the credit and the debit items. Such a balance sheet can obviously not aspire to accuracy in every detail. Many items cannot be expressed in figures at all. For those which can be translated into dollars and cents we cannot always get perfectly reliable statistics. In many cases we must resort to estimates. Fortunately the most important data are those for which the figures are most trustworthy, and, as regards the others, it will not be altogether fruitless to enumerate them, even though we may not be able to give their value in legal tender.
1. The importance of tobacco in our national budget is shown by the latest census figures, according to which it ranks eleventh among the industries of the country, with respect to the value of the product. Our manufactured tobacco was worth at the factory in 1909, $416,695,000. It thus outranked bread and other bakery products, women's clothing, copper, malt liquors, automobiles, petroleum, and distilled liquors. It was but about a third less important than manufactures of cotton. Its value was more than twice as great as that of distilled liquors.[3]These figures do not, of course, tell us how much the people now spend on tobacco. They represent the value of the product at the factory four years ago. They do not include such items as transportation, middlemen's profit,advertising, etc., which enter into the retail price. Nor do they include the large amount spent upon imported tobacco.
A careful statistician, Professor William B. Bailey, of Yale, published, nearly two years ago, some figures showing that the people of the United States spent at that time in a single year about $1,100,000,000 on tobacco. As the receipts from the internal revenue tax on tobacco have increased by about fourteen per cent. in the last two years, it seems fair to assume that the general consumption has increased by this amount. Fourteen per cent. of $1,100,000,000 would be $154,000,000. It seems, therefore, conservative to state that at the present time the people are spending at least $1,200,000,000 for the pleasure of smoking and chewing. As a check upon these figures, the author has made two independent estimates each by a different process, and their results confirm the figures given above. It should be noted, moreover, that this estimate applies only to the direct purchase of tobacco. It does not include the accessories of smoking, such as matches, pipes, receptacles for holding tobacco, cuspidors, etc. In the fiscal year 1911-12, we imported pipes and smokers' articles valued at $1,478,000, in addition to what we produced at home. The difficulty of securing estimates on these accessories is so great that no attempt has been made to include them. If they could be included, the amount which tobacco users spend for their particular pleasure would undoubtedly foot up a great deal more than $1,200,000,000 a year at the present time.
The significance of these figures can best be appreciated, if we compare them with other items in our national budget. To put the matter concretely, "tobacco takers" spend in a single year twice the amount spent by the entire country on railroad travel[4]and about three times the amount which it spends on its common school system; they pay out annually about three times the entire cost of the Panama Canal; they destroy directly about threetimes as much property as was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. Their smokes and chews cost them just about twice what it costs to maintain the government of the United States, including the interest on the public debt. Our smokers could in a year and a half pay off the entire bonded debt of our states, cities, and counties, as it was in 1902, and in an additional nine months the entire interest-bearing debt of the United States, if they were willing to exercise the self-denial which was exercised a few years ago by the Persian people.[5]
Here are also a few comparisons with foreign countries. A well-known international jurist not long ago put together, as an argument against war, the figures showing the expenditure of the leading nations of the world on their army and navy. The list included Germany, Russia, France, Great Britain, and Japan. The figures for 1910 footed up $1,217,000,000 or approximately the amount devoted to tobacco by the people of the United States in a single year.[6]Our smokers impose upon the resources of the country a burden larger than the war indemnity which Germany exacted of France after a humiliating defeat in 1871; they spend about six times what it costs the German Empire to maintain its elaborate and comprehensive system of workingmen's insurance.[7]
2. The cost of smoking to the country is by no means limited to its costs to the smoker. Chief among its indirect burdens is the incineration of property other than tobacco leaves, and the destruction of innocent lives which it exacts as its annual toll from non-smokers. We have had some tragic illustrations of this in recent years. The Triangle shirtwaist fire in New York City in 1910 not only burned up valuable property but caused a cruel loss of life. Over one hundred and forty workers were sacrificed in this case to a cigarette.
In the winter of 1912 occurred the destruction of the Equitable Building, "caused by the careless tossing of a match into a waste paper basket in the Savarin restaurant which occupied quarters in the basement. This match had doubtless been used to light a cigar or cigarette."[8]The waste of time caused by this fire in addition to the actual destruction of the structure must have been enormous, if one thinks of the loss of the records of the great corporations which occupied the building, and of the inconvenience and delays suffered by stockholders and policy holders and other persons who had business relations with them. The fire which destroyed a part of the state capitol at Albany, including a vast number of books and manuscripts, was in all probability caused by a smoker, though the evidence is not quite as conclusive as in the case of the Triangle shirtwaist factory and the Equitable Building. Powell Evans says regarding this fire: "The financial loss is $6,000,000. The loss of documents and records is priceless." And yet to estimate the total social loss we should add to the pecuniary value of the building and its contents, the waste of time and labor inflicted upon a large number of innocent students who desired to use the library, but were unable to do so. All of the readers of the summary of legislation, e. g., were seriously embarrassed, since this fire delayed the issue of this publication by a couple of years.
These cases are referred to, because they were peculiarly dramatic and are still fresh in the memory of newspaper readers. But it would be a mistake to assume that they represent anything exceptional or phenomenal, like an earthquake or a tornado. Smoking is a chronic and regular cause of fires, perfectly familiar to those whose profession requires them to risk their lives in fighting them, a cause as susceptible of statistical treatment as the mortality from tuberculosis or typhoid. Unfortunately our statistics on this subject are very meagre, and efforts to secure figures from insurance men, who would be expected to have a direct interest in ascertaining the facts, have been surprisingly discouraging. Through the prompt courtesy ofthe officials concerned, however, the reports of several state fire marshals and of the fire commissioners of several large cities have been secured, and are summarized below.
These statistics make no claim to completeness. In the nature of things, the causes of many fires cannot be ascertained, and, even where they are stated in a printed report, they are not always easy to interpret. For the particular subject under discussion it is especially hard to know what percentage of the fires caused by carelessness with matches should be charged to smokers. The common use of electric lights in cities, as well as of permanent fires for cooking and heating, makes it altogether reasonable to suppose that a very large percentage of the matches used serve the purposes of smokers. Observation of the habits of smokers indicates that a still larger percentage of fires caused by the careless use of matches is attributable to them. To avoid exaggeration, however, it has been thought best not to assume that all of the fires caused by carelessness with matches should be charged to smokers. Hence two columns are printed, one showing the fires due to matches (exclusive of matches in the hands of children and matches supposed to be ignited by rats or mice), the other showing the fires which are caused directly by cigars, cigarette stumps, smoking in bed, etc. The column giving the total number of fires for which causes are assigned is made by deducting from the total number of fire alarms the cases of false alarms, double alarms, etc., and the cases in which the cause was either not ascertained, or so vaguely stated as to be meaningless.
Causes of Fires as Given in Latest Reports