,,practical ,,agitation ,by the ,same ,author ,,emerson ,,and ,,other ,,essays4 #a4be4 ,,causes ,,and ,,consequences4 #a4be4 ,,practical ,,agitation ,,by ,,john ,,jay ,,chapman ,,new ,,york ,,charles ,,scribner',s ,,sons #aijj ,copyright1 #aijj1 ,,by ,,charles ,,scribner',s ,,sons4 ,,university ,,press ,,john ,,wilson ,,and ,,son ,,cambridge1 ,u4 ,s4 ,a4 ,,dedicated ,,to ,the ,memory ,,of ,,theodore ,,bacon ,,preface ,this book is an attempt to follow the track of personal influence across society4 ,the first three chapters are taken up with discussions of political reform1 the fourth chapter with contemporary journalism4 ,the results of these discussions are then summarized in the chapters called 8,principles40 ,i know that there are as many ways of stating the main idea of the book as there are minds in the world4 ,that idea is1 that we can always do more for mankind by following the good in a straight line than we can by making concessions to evil4 ,the illusion that it is wise or necessary to suppress our instinctive love of truth comes from an imperfect understanding of what that instinctive love of truth represents1 and of what damage happens both to ourselves and to others when we suppress it4 ,the more closely we look at the facts1 the more serious does this damage appear4 ,and on the other hand1 the more closely we look at the facts1 the more trifling1 inconsequent1 and absurd do all those reasons appear which strive to make us accept1 and thereby sanctify and preserve1 some portion of the conceded evil in the world4 ,j4 ,j4 ,c4 ,,new ,,york1 ,february #e1 #aijj4 ,,contents ,,page ,i4 ,,election ,,time #a ,,ii4 ,,between ,,elections #cd ,,iii4 ,,the ,,masses #fg ,,iv4 ,,literature #hc ,v4 ,,principles #ajd ,,vi4 ,,principles 7continued7 #abf ,,vii4 ,,conclusion #ace ,,practical ,,agitation ,i ,,election ,,time ,it is the ambition of the agitator to use the machinery of government to make men more unselfish4 ,in so far as he succeeds in this1 he is creating a living church1 the only sort of ,state church that would be entirely at one with our system1 because it would be merely a representation in the formal government of a spirit abroad among the people4 ,campaign platforms are merely creeds4 8,i believe in ,civil ,service ,reform0 is a way of saying 8,i do not believe in theft10 and the phrase was a fragmentary and incomplete formulation of the greater truth4 ,it was the sign that a movement was beginning among the people due to reawakening instinct1 reawakening sensibility4 ,it was the forerunner of all those changes for the better that have been spreading over our administrative government during the last thirty years4 ,a quiet revolution has been going forward under our eyes1 recorded step by step4 ,it is only because our standards have been going up faster than the reforms came in that we believe the evils are growing worse4 ,such changes go on all the time all over the world1 but the value and rarity of this one come from its unity and coherence4 ,such a thing might happen in ,germany or in ,england1 but you could not disentangle the forces4 ,thirty years ago politics was thought to be no occupation for a gentleman4 ,it was a matter of bar-rooms1 ballot-box-stuffing1 rolls of dirty bills4 ,you had as little to do with it as possible4 ,you voted your party ticket1 you paid your taxes4 ,you bribed the ashman and the policeman at your uptown house1 and the clerk of the court1 the inspector1 the custom-house agent1 and the commissioner of jurors at your office4 ,that subtle change of attitude in the citizen towards his public duty which is now in progress1 has in it something of the religious4 ,the whole matter becomes comprehensible the moment we cease to think of it as politics1 and see in it a widespread and perfectly natural reaction against an era of wickedness4 ,had our framework of government afforded no outlet to the force1 had our ills been irremediably crystallized into formal tyranny1 we should perhaps have witnessed great revivalist upheavals1 sacraments1 saints1 prophets1 prostrations1 and adoration4 ,as it is1 we have seen deadly pamphlets1 schedules1 enactments1 documents which it required our whole attention and our whole time to understand2 and behind each of them a remorseless interrogator with a white cravat and a face of iron4 ,what motive drives them on8 ,what oil fills their lamps8 ,who feeds them8 ,these horrid things they bring1 these instruments forged by unremitting toil1 technical1 insufferable1--they are the cure4 ,with such levers1 and with them only1 can the stones be lifted off the hearts of men4 ,they are the alternatives of revolution4 8,reform0 may have a thousand meanings1 and be used to cover a thousand projects of doubtful utility4 ,but with us it has a definite meaning4 ,when the foreigner says1 8,ah1 but is your reform the right remedy80 he thinks it is a question of policy1 or of the incidence of a tax4 ,he supposes there is an intellectual question4 ,but with us the problem is how to protect an attorney against a dishonest judge2 how to stop the sheriff from stealing a fund1 pending the litigation4 ,what we want to do1 what we are doing1 is to get rid of gross malpractices1 gross theft1 gross abuse of public trust4 ,it is waste of time to expend learned argument on a judge who has been bought4 ,the litigants must join forces and get rid of that judge before they can talk4 ,of course we know that the real trouble with our politics is that these attorneys have themselves bribed the judge and share in the division of their clients' property4 ,it is to questions of this kind that the conscience of the country has been drawn4 ,there is nothing peculiarly sacred about politics1 but the history of reform movements during the last few years furnishes such striking and wonderful illustrations of human nature that it is worth study4 ,a few men have a desire1 a hope of improving some evil4 ,they stagger towards it and fall4 ,the impulse is always good4 ,the mistakes made are progressive4 ,they record the past2 they outline the future4 ,if you draw an arrow through them1 it will point north4 ,if you arrange the reform movements against ,tammany ,hall in a series1 and consider them minutely1 you will find that the earlier ones are comparatively corrupt1 sporadic1 disorganized1 ignorant1 and shortsighted in purpose4 ,they have steadily become more honest1 more frequent1 more coherent1 more intelligent and ambitious4 ,if you examine any one of them1 it would be impossible to misplace it in the series4 ,looking more closely1 you see the reason4 ,the earlier the movement1 the more zealously do its leaders imitate the methods of current politics4 ,each movement represents the philosophy of its era4 ,we have had3 #a4 ,the frankly corrupt era 7fighting the devil with fire74 #b4 ,the compromise era 7buying reform74 #c4 ,the educational era1 which began two years ago1 after ,low was defeated1 when people said they were glad of the movement1 in spite of the defeat4 ,note this1 that ,low did not lead a lost cause1 nor was any belief in lost causes at the bottom of his movement4 ,but in making the best of his defeat1 many minds stumbled into philosophy4 ,and this illustrates the progress of an idea4 ,people will accept it as an explanation of the past before they will take it as a guide to the future4 ,it glimmers before them at a moment when they need comfort1 and vanishes in the light of a comfortable habit or prejudice4 ,this apparition of the educational idea flitted across ,new ,york and took root in many minds4 ,now the smoky torch of reform has passed from hand to hand1 and is beginning to burn brighter4 ,how could the original darkness give forth more than a gleam8 ,all progress is experimental4 ,the architects discovered by practice that the arch would support itself4 ,their earlier efforts were tentative4 ,you can see what notion they had in mind1 as they very gradually learned how to subserve the laws of gravity and tension4 ,each improvement is qualified by its author's limitations1 but shows a gain as toward the immediate past4 ,you are following the steps of the groping and fumbling mind of man1 fettered at every point by his own conceptions1 moving each time towards a bolder generalization1 each stride forward exactly proportionate to the breadth of thought on which it is calculated4 ,what other method is there8 ,the men who fought the ,tweed ,ring did what passed for 8politics0 in their day4 8,votes must be paid for1 of course2 but let the people vote right40 ,the philosophy of the ,strong movement in #ahid showed an advance4 8,the plunder must be divided1 of course2 but let us have it because we are virtuous40 ,the ,low movement in #ahig appealed to voters on the ground of self-interest4 ,labor had to be conciliated1 local politicians of the worst sort subsidized2 #aej1jjj was spent1 four-fifths of it in ways that did more harm than good4 ,but the methods were delicate4 ,the battle of the standards goes forward ceaselessly2 but all standards are going up4 ,what the half-way reformer calls 8politics10 the idealist calls chicanery2 what the idealist calls politics1 the half-way reformer calls ,utopia4 ,but in #ahga they are discussing whether or not the reformers shall falsify the returns2 in #ahid they are discussing whether or not they shall expose fraud in their own camp4 ,the men engaged in all these struggles are in perfect ignorance that they are really leading a religious reaction4 ,they think that since they are in politics the doctrines of compromise apply4 ,they are drawn into politics by conscience1 but once there1 they have only their business training to guide them1--a training in the art of subserving material interests4 ,now if a piece of your land has an uncertain boundary1 you have a right to compromise on any theory you like1 because you own the land4 ,but if you start out with the sole and avowed purpose of upholding honesty in politics1 and you uphold anything else or subserve any other interest whatever1 you are a deceiver4 ,when you began you did not say 8,i stand for a readjustment of political interests4 ,there will be a continuation of many abuses under my administration1 to be sure2 but ,i hope they will not be quite so bad as heretofore4 ,i shall not insist on the absolutely unselfish conduct of my office4 ,it is not practical40 ,if you had said this1 you might have got the friendly support of a few doctrinaires4 ,but you would never have got the support and approval of the great public4 ,you would not have been elected4 ,and therefore you did not say it4 ,on the contrary1 what our reformers do is this3 ,they begin1 before election1 by promising an absolutely pure administration4 ,they make proclamations of a new era1 and after they have secured a certain following they proceed to chaffer over how much honesty they will demand and how much take1 as if they were rescuing property4 ,these men are1 then1 in their desires a part of the future1 and in their practices of the past4 ,their desires move society forward1 their practices set it back2 and so we have moved forward by jolts1 until1 like a people emerging from the deep sea1 the water looks clearer above our heads and we can almost see the sky4 ,every advance has cost great effort4 ,it took as much courage for a ,mugwump to renounce his party allegiance in #ahhd as it does now for a man to denounce both national parties as dens of thieves4 ,it took as much hard thinking some years ago for the leaders of the ,reform ,democrats to cut loose from ,tammany ,hall as it does now for the ,independent to see that there is in all our politics only one machine1 held together by all the bosses and their heelers1 and that the whole thing must be attacked at once4 ,how gradual has been the process of emancipation from intellectual bondage6 ,how inevitably people are limited by the terms in which they think6 ,a generation of men has been consumed by the shibboleth 8reform within the party10--a generation of educated and right-minded men1 who accomplished in their day much good1 and left the country better than they found it1 but are floating to-day like hulks in the trough of the sea of politics1 because all their mind and all their energy were exhausted in discovering certain superficial evils and in fighting them4 ,their analysis of political elements left the deeper causes mysterious4 ,they did not see mere human nature4 ,they still treated ,republicanism and ,democracy--empty superstitions--as ideas1 and they handled with reverence the bones of bogus saints1 and the whole apparatus of clap-trap by which they had been governed4 ,and yet it is owing to the activity of these men that the deeper political conditions became visible4 ,men cannot transcend their own analysis and see themselves under the microscope4 ,the work we do transforms us into social factors4 ,we are a part of the changes we bring in4 ,before we know it1 we ourselves are the problem4 ,the ,mugwumps revolt and defeat ,blaine4 ,they strengthen the ,democratic party4 ,they again revolt and defeat ,bryan1 and strengthen the ,republican party4 ,so in the little towns all over the country1 on local issues the ,democrats are put out for being dishonest1 or the ,republicans are put out for being dishonest4 ,through this process the younger generation has been led to note one fact3 both parties are dishonest4 8,ah6 but10 says the parent1 8,i am a good ,democrat4 ,my party is not dishonest all the time4 ,it needs discipline40 ,it is too late3 the young man hates both parties equally4 ,he now looks at his father1 and sees in him a sample of corrupted intelligence1 a man able to repeat meaningless phrases1 and he draws hope from the conclusion4 ,it was natural that the father should have been boss-ridden all his life1 because he could be whistled back to support iniquity by an appeal to party loyalty4 ,he belonged to a race that had lost the power of political initiative4 ,they could not act alone4 ,they must daub themselves with party names or they would catch cold4 ,they had not the stomach to be merely men4 ,thirty years ago one-half of society thought that every ,democrat was a rebel and a scoundrel4 ,the world to that society was composed of two classes1--,republicans 7righteous men71 ,democrats 7villains74 ,twenty years of an almost steady growth in the power of self-government or of what the ,germans would call civic consciousness1 has barely sufficed to strike off the adjectives1 but it has left mankind still divided1 as before4 ,meanwhile there has emerged a group of men who see the whole problem in a much simpler light4 ,these men have carried forward the analysis which their fathers1 or let us say their elder brothers1 had begun1 to such a point that there are no words in it which are meaningless1 no factors which are not reduced to terms of human nature4 ,they did nothing but add the last link to a chain of logic4 ,their predecessors discovered ,the ,machine1 and spent their lives in trying to belong to a party without strengthening its ,machine4 ,these latter men discovered that both parties were ruled by the same ,machine4 ,they see one issue1 and only one issue in ,american politics1 namely1 the attack on that ,machine4 ,moreover1 these men have political initiative2 that is to say1 they contemplate creating conditions1 and not merely making transient use of visible conditions4 ,their idea is so simple that any one whose mind is not warped by the cant of party politics understands it at once4 8,all this political corruption is a unity4 ,vote against it and you will beat it4 ,vote for any part of it and you strengthen it40 ,this sounds simple4 ,but in practice the prejudices1 the interests1 the passions and political temperament of the whole population are against it4 ,every argument that the people understand is against this course4 ,everything that either party fears or hates in the other party is passionately pointed out as a reason against independent voting4 ,according to ,republicans1 independent voting involves 8allowing ,croker to extend his rule over the entire ,state10 and 8enabling ,tammany ,hall to control the judiciary10 and 8endangering the cause of sound money40 ,according to ,democrats1 it involves the encouraging of ,trusts1 ,tariffs1 ,pensions1 ,expansion and foreign conquest4 ,according to both ,democrats and ,republicans1 independent voting is 8voting in the air10 and is at odds with the spirit of our institutions1 which contemplate two parties and no more4 ,and1 finally1 every one condemns the independent because he violates that thumb rule which slovenly thinkers regard as a summary of all political philosophy1 8,between two evils choose the least40 ,now the answer to all these arguments is that they are the merest mirage4 ,it makes no difference which of the two evils1 ,platt or ,croker1 has the name of ruling the ,state4 ,at present they divide the rule between them4 ,they can do no more4 ,there is no argument that can be used against ,tammany ,hall which is powerful enough to make the ,republican ,ring trustworthy4 ,there is no argument against ,expansion so excessively convincing that it changes the moral character of the ,democratic ,party4 ,these learned arguments are useless1 ludicrous1 pathetic1 irrational1 impotent1 contemptible4 ,they do but distract us from the real issue--which is personal corruption4 ,where shall a man cast his vote against it8 ,if ,i turn out ,mc,kinley because he bleeds the natives1 ,i put in a ,democrat to bleed the natives4 ,if the whitewashing of ,alger arouses public indignation1 ,tammany ,hall feeds at the trough4 ,if ,croker's control of the judiciary arouses popular indignation1 ,platt's pigs feed at the trough4 ,as for sound money1 we have already elected one ,congress on the issue in #ahie1 just as in #ahib we elected a ,congress on the tariff issue4 ,what was done8 ,why1 in each case that was done which the ring wanted done1--nothing4 ,which national party stands for an idea to-day8 ,the only shadow of reason for believing that either does1 is that the ,republicans cried sound money and won4 ,they have done nothing4 ,had ,bryan won1 he would have done nothing1 could have done nothing4 ,there are no issues in ,american politics save this one issue of common honesty4 ,you cannot throw an issue into this whirlpool of vice1 for your issue turns to cash by the contact4 ,we need not waste our time reading the platforms drawn by ,platt and ,croker4 ,we must not vote for any man who does not go into public life as their enemy1 because we know that in so far as he is not their enemy he is ours4 ,as for these dreadful consequences that are always about to follow from a refusal to support one end of the iniquity1 they do not follow4 ,we have the evils now4 ,we are at the worst4 ,the powers of darkness may conspire and heap all in ruins1 but they must not prevent us from beginning upon a constructive line to draw together and build up the powers of light4 ,nor is there the smallest distinction either in the evil or its cure1 between the case of a village1 of a ,state1 or of the whole nation4 ,say you live in a town2 you can only get a clean school-board by running men against both the regular parties4 ,there is no other way of getting rid of ,hanna and the ,presidential ,syndicate than by running an independent candidate for the ,presidency4 ,no form of ,bryanism will oust it1--no rump ,democracy nor any kind of ,democracy4 ,democracy is finished4 ,republicanism is finished4 ,this is the zero point of party loyalty4 ,it has been reached very slowly4 ,it means open war4 ,the citizen is now confronted with a third ticket1 which is a deliberate insult to both the others4 ,no matter what the conditions1 it is an appeal which disintegrates the emotions of the voter4 ,this is the very elixir of reform4 ,people are forced to think4 ,it hurts them4 ,they cry out against those who create the dilemma1 but they cannot escape it4 ,the vote you poll will vary4 ,if the party war-cries are intense and the party candidates promise fairly1 very few men will see the point of your movement4 ,but no one escapes its influence4 ,let us say that five thousand vote your ticket4 ,these are the only men whose response is scheduled4 ,but the political vision of five hundred thousand has been quickened4 ,no atom of this influence is lost4 ,the work was done when the vote was cast4 ,even if it be not counted at all1 it will show in every political camp in the near future4 ,but do you ever have outward success8 ,does the time ever come when the standards of every one are so high that the parties themselves present candidates as good as your own1 and there is no excuse for your existence8 ,that depends upon the trend of the age4 ,one thing only is certain1 that by pursuing this course you are doing all that you can do4 ,you are wasting no power4 ,no part of your force is helping the enemy4 ,after all1 the great discovery is a very simple thing4 ,we have found1 after many experiments1 that what we really want is1 not the turning out of officials1 not the enactment of laws1 but the raising of the general standards4 ,the way to do this is to set up a standard4 ,of course nobody likes to find a foot rule laid against his shortage4 ,even the vocabulary of the average man is attacked by such a system4 ,words like 8courage10 8honesty10 8independence10 8pledge10 8loyalty0 pass current like clipped coin in the language of politics2 and the keying up of words to their biblical value brings out one man a thief and the next a hypocrite4 ,all these civic commotions1 great and small1 that surge up and are scattered1 that form and reform1 the ,people's ,leagues and ,citizens' ,unions1 are the altruism of the community fighting its way to the surface through the obstructions1 the snares1 and the oppressions of the organized world4 ,no discouragement sets it back4 ,no betrayal destroys it4 ,the people come forward with ever new faith4 ,what ceaseless endeavor6 ,what patient trial of various forms of organization6 ,we live in a society where egoism is so thoroughly organized that there is hardly a flicker of faith that cannot be made to heat the devil's pot4 ,the dragon stands ready to eat up the child as soon as it shall be born4 ,you cannot hitch your horse to anything without helping drag the juggernaut4 ,before you know it1 virtue is pocketed4 ,take the most obvious case4 ,the reformers imagine they are in politics and must win at all costs4 ,one enthusiast calls twenty friends into a room and organizes a club--and the club ties his hands and sells out to the nearest bidder4 ,before he knows it he has been organized back into ,tammany ,hall4 ,you begin with a call to arms and a plan of organization4 ,the men come to you in a moment of hope1 showing every shade of intelligence1 every stage of opinion1--one because he believes in your candidate2 one because he hates ,tammany ,hall2 one because he wants prominence2 all because they do not expect to be alone4 ,the men who volunteer have not a clear notion of what they are in for4 ,they thought it was a movement to clean the streets4 ,in the course of their campaign it develops into an attack on a bank4 ,they thought it was a town movement4 ,some stage of it affects national politics4 ,they thought it was a ,roosevelt movement4 ,it turns out to involve hostility to ,roosevelt4 ,your muster shows the vague hope of a lot of men who are utterly incompetent1 undisciplined1 ignorant4 ,they are merchants1 lawyers1 doctors1 professors1 clergymen1 the respectability and intelligence of the town2 and so far as self-government goes they are the tattered children of tyranny4 ,good ,god1 what an army6 ,at the first trumpet they scatter4 ,one sells out1 one recants1 one disappears4 ,they are anywhere and nowhere1 a ship of fools1 a barnyard4 ,the execution of the one idea for which they were brought together has scattered them like sheep4 ,let us take another case4 ,you think that what is needed is to raise a standard4 ,you call your twenty friends about you4 ,they are not corrupt4 ,nevertheless1 let us see who they will be4 ,we are not dealing with an imaginary community1 but with ,american citizens as they exist1 with men every one of whom trusts his instincts to a different extent4 ,each man believes in principle in the abstract1 but thinks it is sometimes hopeless to be severely virtuous in politics4 ,this 8sometimes0 is the crux4 8,is it the time8 ,is this the year8 ,can you do it this way80 ,now1 of course1 it is always the year4 ,it is never hopeless4 ,absolute honesty is always the way4 ,but an age of corruption destroys faith4 ,this is the essential injury4 ,this is the disease4 ,you yourself have a little stronger belief1 a little more political enterprise than your twenty friends4 ,otherwise it would be they who were summoning you to a conference4 ,it is certain that their joint wisdom will result in action less radical than you believe in4 ,they outvote you in council4 ,the standard they set up is not absolute4 ,but this outcome will prevent you from making your point at all4 ,if you are to back your friends up publicly and are honest yourself1 all you can say will be1 8,here's a makeshift40 ,now1 the public instinct understands this very well already4 ,ten per cent of your own faith you have compromised4 ,it has cost you ninety per cent of your educational power2 for the heart of man will respond only to a true thing4 ,what is it that has led you to compromise8 ,why1 the age you live in4 ,you yourself1 being afraid to stand alone1 have dipped your flag1 with the best intentions1 because you cannot see that any other course is practicable4 ,yet you yourself can keep your own intellectual integrity only at the price of destroying your own handiwork4 ,if you do not destroy it1 you are a hypocrite4 ,here in the room with you were twenty men1 the very flower of the idealism of the town1 not chosen by accident1 but coming together by natural selection4 ,twenty more like them do not exist in the community1 for their activity would have revealed them4 ,and yet there was not found faith enough among these to set up an absolute standard4 ,nay1 they hang on your arms and prevent you from raising one4 ,if you are to do it1 you must do it alone4 ,then these men will be the first to denounce you2 for your act damns them4 ,you can only be true to the public conscience by rebuking your friends4 ,if you fail to do this1 your banner is submerged4 ,let us consider the cause of this weakness in ,reform organizations4 ,you wish to appeal to the people with as good a show of names as you can4 ,and so you get a lot of well-known men to indorse you4 ,this is considered practical4 ,let us see if it is4 ,we are fighting ,tammany ,hall4 ,but no one will for an instant admit that every ,tammany man is dishonest4 ,the corruption we started out to correct was a corruption of the intelligence1 a bad habit1 a defect of vision4 ,the same defect keeps ,republicans in line for ,platt1 because he is the ,party1 a recognized agent of the community4 ,the same defect prevents a just man from joining a new movement unless ,banker ,jones is leading it4 ,the habit of the community is to rely on some one else to govern them4 ,no man trusts himself4 ,the ,machine1 upon analysis1 turns out to be a lack of self-reliance4 ,wherever you see a man who gives some one else's corruption1 some one else's prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself1 you see a cog in ,the ,machine that governs us4 ,the proof of it is that he will dissuade you from striking the iniquity4 ,he will explain that you can't try it without doing more harm than good4 ,you will find that at every point of defence1 from the arguments of ,mr4 ,croker himself to the arguments of some sainted college president1 the reasons given are identical4 ,i cannot find any one who defends stealing4 ,they only deprecate action as being inexpedient4 ,now1 then1 if ,i ask a voter to join my organization1 and use as a bait an appeal to this very weakness--his reliance upon other men's opinion--can ,i hope to make much headway8 ,i am taking in just so much of ,tammany ,hall4 ,my whole body becomes an adjunct of ,tammany1 in the same sense that ,mr4 ,platt's machine is an adjunct4 ,i am ,croker's last outpost4 ,i stand there calling myself reform1 and yet ,i do not act4 ,some one else must now come forward and try his hand4 ,this process of ebullition1 and thereupon stagnation1 has happened again and again4 ,i suppose there are a dozen extant wrecks of reform political organizations in the city4 ,many people have despaired altogether4 ,they think it is a law of ,god that political organizations become corrupt in the second year4 ,the experience is entirely due to the persistent putting of new wine into old bottles4 ,in their names and hopes these bodies have stood for purity1 but in their membership they have1 even in their inception1 stood for prejudice4 ,then1 too1 the bottles bore good labels1 and bad wine was soon poured into them4 ,a political organization is a transferable commodity4 ,you could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful4 ,the short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this3 all the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling4 ,all the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else4 ,conciliation is the enemy4 ,it is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes4 ,prejudice is the enemy4 ,whoever is not for you is against you4 ,what1 then1 must the enthusiast do in the way of organization8 ,let him go ahead and do some particular thing1 and ask the public to help him do it4 ,he will thus get behind him whatever force exists at that especial time for that especial purpose4 ,it may not be much2 but no amount of letterheads and great seals will increase it4 ,let him abandon written constitutions4 ,let him not be bound by a vote nor seek to bind others by a vote4 ,if you have formal procedure1 you are tied up1 for you will then have to convert six tailors into apostles before you can get at the public4 ,content yourself more modestly4 ,see a friend or two and tell them what you intend to do4 ,if they won't help you1 do it alone4 ,do not think you are wasting your time1 even if no one joins you4 ,the prejudice against the individual is part of the evil you are fighting4 ,if you keep on in a consistent line of action1 people will come to you one by one1 and your group will grow into a sort of centre of influence4 ,there will result a unity of method as well as of aim1 which1 as your purposes become understood1 will enable you to act with the speed of thought and the force of an avalanche4 ,one great merit of this method will be that your whole policy will remain an enigma to every one except those who really want what you want1 namely1 to raise the general standards4 ,only such men will seek you out4 ,any one else is a danger4 ,thus your organization will grow slowly1 but will remain uncapturable1 un-get-at-able1 an influence1 a menace1 a standard4 ,as fast as adherents appear1 you can set up centre after centre of enlightenment1 preparatory to your campaigns2 debates1 pamphlets1 correspondence1 the battery of agitation4 ,and in the mean time the benefit done to the workers themselves is worth all the pains4 ,by adopting formal machinery you would not only organize the wrong people in1 but you would organize the right people out4 ,new ,york ,city is full of men whose passion for educating can find no vent in politics1 because politics are corrupt1 and who run civic leagues1 night-schools1 lyceums1 and people's institutes4 ,they are at work in your cause although they call it by different names4 ,all this zeal is at your disposal if you will only leave your office doors open and do something to deserve its support4 ,do not adopt a scheme that excludes these men4 ,you cannot impress them into your army1 but you do not need to impress them1--only to know them personally4 ,you cannot make them district captains1 but they are district captains already4 8,but10 you say1 8are not the votes of your twenty friends as valuable as your own8 ,whence this egoism80 ,it is not egoism4 ,i am ready to follow any one who wants to do this particular thing1 that is1 make an appeal to absolute unselfishness1 at no point to conciliate any one4 8,but this is anarchy3 every man his own party40 ,on the contrary1 it is consolidation2 for should two men arise1 proposing this course1 they would coalesce at once4 8,but10 you say1 8who is to do all the work8 ,how are you to get men to come forward unless you give them tangible1 formulated doctrines1 papers to sign1 and words to mumble80 ,the answer is that the men who do the work in reform campaigns do not need these things4 ,literature and doctrines you will undoubtedly produce4 ,it is not necessary for the effective distribution of them1 that you should adopt the parade of ,american party discipline4 ,organization1 head-quarters1 and a distribution of labor you must develop4 ,but you must not have them on paper faster than they exist in reality4 8,but10 you say1 8this is not representative government4 ,where are your convention1 your argument1 your vote1 your majority1 your loyalty8 ,our people must have these things40 ,the answer is that1 in spite of their views on representative government1 our people still remain human beings4 ,as fast as they find themselves spiritually represented by some person or body1 they follow that influence4 ,it is representative government1 but it represents only the positive and aspiring part of the community1--the part which never gets represented under your system1 because that system insists upon alloying it with other elements and ruining its power4 ,it is educational activity in the purest form4 ,by what other means can you speak to the whole people at once in the language of action8 ,by what other means can you reach the conscience of the unknown man1 who has not touched politics for twenty years because he could take no part in it1 because he did not understand it1--the disfranchised1 scattered1 and dumb men on whose voice the future waits8 ,consider what you are trying to do4 ,a party under control of a machine is held together by an appeal to self-interest4 ,its caucuses1 affiliations1 resources1 methods are constructed on that principle4 ,your body1 whose aim is to increase the unselfishness and intellect of your fellow-citizens1 must be held together at every point by self-sacrifice4 ,if the reform body shall blindly do just the opposite of what a party does1 it will pursue practical politics4 ,the regular party is in theory representative of enrolled voters4 ,you represent the sentiment of undiscovered people4 ,the party appeals to old forces and extant conditions4 ,you appeal to new feelings and new voters4 ,the party offers a gift to every adherent4 ,you must offer him nothing but labor4 ,that is your protection against traitors4 ,the party accords every man the weight of his vote in its counsels4 ,you must give him nothing but the influence of his mind4 8,but10 you shout1 8this is not politics4 ,you can never hold men together without bonds40 ,the fact is otherwise4 ,there is some force at work in this town which1 year after year1 brings forward groups of men who proclaim a new dispensation4 ,they are1 in so far as they have any cohesion1 held together without bonds now4 ,all formal bonds will chain them to the past4 ,for electrical force you must adopt electrical machinery2 for moral force1 moral bonds4 ,all this political system is the harness for the wrong passion4 ,every scrap of it imprisons your power4 ,the average ,american citizen is slow to see that you can exercise political influence without the current machinery4 ,this is a part of ,the ,machine in his brain4 ,he cannot see the operation of law by which virtue always tells4 ,but his ignorance does not affect the operation of that law1 even upon himself4 ,this elaborate analysis of just how the force of feeling in yourself can best be used politically1 is1 after all1 only an instance of a general law4 ,the shortest path between two points always turns out to be a straight line4 ,people who believe in the complexity of life1 and have theories about crooked lines1 want something else beside moral influence4 ,they want influence through office1 or influence toward special ends1 or influence with particular persons4 8,can't you see you are destroying your influence80 they cry1 while every stroke is telling4 8,a thinks you are a lunatic40 ,praise ,god4 8,b has withdrawn his subscription40 ,i had not hoped for this so soon4 8,but he has joined ,platt40 ,you misstate the case4 ,he was always with ,platt1 but now he has revealed it4 ,these refractory molecules are breaking up4 ,see the lines of force begin to show a clean cleavage4 ,ten thousand intelligences now see the man for what he is4 ,at what point in the progress of this movement will people begin to see that it is practical politics of the most effective kind8 ,some people see it now4 ,the first people to feel the strain are the men whose livelihood depends on the outcome4 ,the last illustration of this was given in ,roosevelt's campaign against ,van ,wyck in ,new ,york ,state4 ,in this case1 as generally happens1 the real battle was fought in committee rooms before the forces were in the field4 ,it was the struggle for position4 ,roosevelt was to be ,republican candidate for governor1 and was sure of election4 ,the fight came over the minor offices4 ,our ,new ,york form of ballot practically forces a man to vote for a 8straight0 ticket1 and half a dozen independents put up a complete ticket with ,roosevelt at the head of it4 ,their purpose was to prevent the ,republicans from using ,roosevelt's military popularity to sweep into office a lot of henchmen4 ,within ten days the ,republican henchmen all over the ,state were taken with convulsions4 ,every crank of the ,machine trembled4 ,it turned its awful power upon ,roosevelt and ordered him to get off the ,independent ticket4 ,he obeyed and protected the henchmen4 ,the episode illustrates the practical power of a few independents who can act quickly4 ,the panic in the ,republican camp was entirely justified4 ,if three tickets had remained in the field with ,roosevelt at the head of two of them1 thousands of ,democrats and thousands of ,republicans would have voted for the ,reform ticket4 ,the ,republican ticket would have polled merely the dyed-in-the-wool machine ,republicans4 ,the rumpus among the ,republican heelers--following so slight a cause as the action of five or six citizens who took the field with a ticket of their own--resembled the action of a geyser when a cake of soap is thrown into it--rumbling--followed by terrific vomiting4 ,a little practical discipline among the reformers is all that is required to make them formidable1--the discipline of experience1 of acting together1 of personal trust4 ,this is to be acquired only in the field of action4 ,it is encouraging to find how small a body of men it takes--even at the present moment--to upset the calculations of the politicians4 ,the force that made the ,republicans afraid did not lie in the parcel of men who threw in the soap4 ,it came from the great public4 ,the episode showed that the ,republicans were afraid to appeal to the country4 ,they knew that their cabal was almost as much hated as ,tammany ,hall4 ,there is always great difficulty in this world as to who shall bell the cat2 but conventions of mice do not further the matter4 ,the way to do it is for a parcel of mice to take their political lives in their hands and proceed to do it4 99 99 99 99 99 ,the real meaning of all these movements will not be perceived till their work has been done4 ,as history1 the cause and course of them will be so plain that a word will suffice to explain them4 ,in the light of history it will be clear that the improvement in the personnel of our public life was due to the demands of the public--expressed in citizen's movements4 ,we have already reached a point where neither party dares appeal to the public--as they did ten years ago--on purely party grounds4 ,roosevelt and ,van ,wyck both claimed to be men superior to the average partisan4 ,the advance of political thought has already made the dullest man perceive the ,machine within his own party1 and every day spreads the news that there is only a single machine in all our politics4 ,the destruction of this machine will not be like the destruction of the monasteries by ,henry ,,viii41 but it will consist in the substitution of new timber for old in the parties themselves4 ,any one who looks for an expulsion of ,tammany ,hall like the expulsion of the ,moors from ,spain1 will be disappointed4 ,there will always be a ,tammany ,hall4 ,but it will be run by respectable men1 who will look back with wonder and disgust upon this period1 and who will give the public an honest administration because the public has demanded it4 ,,ii ,,between ,,elections ,an election is like a flash of lightning at midnight4 ,you get an instantaneous photograph of what every man is doing4 ,you see his real relation toward his government4 ,but an election happens only once a year4 ,government goes on day and night4 ,it is hard breaking down the popular fallacy that there is such a thing as 8politics10 governed by peculiar conditions1 which must be understood and respected2 that the whole thing is a mystic avocation1 run as a trade by high priests and low priests1 and is remote from our daily life4 ,our system of party government has been developed with the aim of keeping the control in the hands of professionals4 ,technicalities have been multiplied1 and the rules of the game have become more and more complex4 ,there exists1 consequently1 an unformulated belief that the corruption of politics is something by itself4 ,yet there probably never was a civilization where the mesh of all powers and interests was so close4 ,it is like the interlocking of roots in a swamp4 ,such density and cohesion were never seen in any epoch1 such a mat and tangle of personalities1 where every man is tied up with the fibres of every other4 ,if you take an axe or a saw1 and cut a clean piece out of it anywhere1 you will maim every member of society4 ,how idle1 then1 even to think of politics as a subject by itself1 or of the corruptions of the times as localized6 ,politics gives what the chemists call a 8mirror10 and shows the ingredients in the average man's composition4 ,but you must take your mind off politics if you want to understand ,america4 ,you must take up the lives of individuals and follow them out1 as they play against each other in counterpoint4 ,as soon as you do this you will not be able to determine where politics begins and where it stops4 ,it is all politics3 it is all social intercourse3 it is all business4 ,any square foot of this soil will give you the whole fauna and flora of the land4 ,where will you put in your wedge of reform8 ,there is not a cranny anywhere4 ,the mass is like crude copper ore that cannot be blasted4 ,it blows out the charge4 ,we think that political agitation must show political results4 ,this is like trying to alter the shape of a shadow without touching its object4 ,the hope is not only mistaken1 it is absurd4 ,the results to be obtained from reform movements cannot show in the political field till they have passed through the social world4 8,but1 after all1 what you want is votes1 is it not80 8,it would be so encouraging to see virtue win1 that everybody would vote for you thereafter4 ,why don't you manage it somehow80 ,this sort of talk is the best record of incompetence which corruption has imprinted4 ,enlighten this class and you have saved the ,republic4 ,why1 my friend1 you are so lost1 you are so much a mere product of tyranny that you do not know what a vote is4 ,true1 we want votes1 but the votes we want must be cast spontaneously4 ,we do not want them so badly as to buy them4 ,a vote is only important because it is an opinion4 ,even a dictator cannot force opinions upon his subjects by six months of rule2 and yet the complaint is that decency gets few votes after a year of effort by a handful of radicals who are despised by the community4 ,we only enter the field of politics because we can there get a hearing4 ,the candidates in reform movements are tools4 ,they are like crowbars that break open the mind of the age4 ,they cannot be dodged1 concealed1 or laughed away4 ,every one is aroused from his lethargy by seeing a real man walk on the scene1 amid all the stage properties and marionettes of conventional politics4 8,no fair60 the people cry4 ,they do not vote for him1 of course1 but they talk about the portent with a vigor no mere doctrine could call forth1 and the discussion blossoms at a later date into a new public spirit1 a new and genuine demand for better things4 ,it is apparent that between the initial political activity of reformers and their ultimate political accomplishments1 there must intervene the real agitation1 the part that does the work1 which goes on in the brains and souls of individual men1 and which can only be observed in social life1 in manners and conversation4 ,now let us take up the steps by which1 in practical life1 the reaction is set going4 ,enter the nearest coterie of radicals and listen to the quarrel4 ,reformers proverbially disagree1 and #8their sects mince themselves almost to atoms4' ,with us the quarrel always arises over the same point4 8,can we afford1 under these particular circumstances1 to tell the exact truth80 ,i have never known a reform movement in which this discussion did not rage from start to finish1 nor have ,i known one where any other point was involved4 ,you are a citizens' committee4 ,the parties offer to give you half a loaf4 ,well and good4 ,but this is not their main object4 ,they want you to call it a whole loaf4 ,they want to dissipate your agitation by getting you to tell the public that you are satisfied4 ,what they hate is the standard4 ,the war between you and them is a spiritual game of chess4 ,they must get you to say they are right4 ,it is their only means of retaining their power4 ,thus the apple of discord falls into the ,reform camp4 ,half its members take the bait4 ,in ,new ,york ,city our politics have been so picturesque1 the pleas of the politician so shallow1 the lies demanded from the reformers so obvious1 that the eternal principles of the situation have been revealed in their elemental simplicity4 ,it is just because the impulse towards better things carries no material content--we do not want any particular thing1 but we want an improvement in everything--it is just because the whole movement is purely moral1 that the same questions always arise4 ,we ought not to grieve over the discussion1 over the heart-burn and heated argument that start from a knot of radicals and run through the community1 setting men against each other4 ,the quarrel in the executive committee of this reform body is the initiative of much wholesome life4 ,they are no more responsible for it1 they can no more avoid it1 the community can no more advance to higher standards before they have had it1 than a child can skate before it can walk4 ,the executive committee is discussing the schools4 ,in consequence of a recent agitation1 the politicians have put up a candidate who will give new plumbing1 even if he does steal the books1 and the question is whether the ,school ,association shall indorse this candidate4 ,if it does1 he wins4 ,if it does not1 both plumbing and books are likely to remain the prey of the other party1 and the ,lord knows how bad that is4 ,the fight rages in the committee1 and some sincere old gentleman is prophesying typhoid4 ,the practical question is3 8,do you want good plumbing1 or do you want the truth80 ,you cannot have both this year4 ,if the association goes out and tells the public exactly what it knows1 it will get itself laughed at1 insult the candidate1 and elect his opponent4 ,if it tells the truth1 it might as well run a candidate of its own as a protest and an advertisement of that truth4 ,it can buy good plumbing with a lie1 and the old gentleman thinks it ought to do so4 ,the reformers are going to endorse the candidate1 and upon their heads will be visited his theft of the books4 ,they have sold out the little public confidence they held4 ,had they stood out for another year1 under the practical rgime which they had already endured for twenty1 and had they devoted themselves to augmenting the public interest in the school question1 both parties would have offered them plumbing and books to allay the excitement4 ,the parties might1 perhaps1 have relaxed their grip on the whole school system rather than meet the issue4 ,but the ,association does not understand this4 ,it does not1 as yet1 clearly know its own mind4 ,all this procedure1 this going forward and back1 is necessary4 ,the community must pass through these experiences before it discovers that the shortest road to good schools is truth4 ,a few men learn by each turn of the wheel1 and these men tend to consolidate4 ,they become a sort of school of political thought4 ,they see that they do not care a whit more about the schools than they do about the parks2 that the school agitation is a handy way to make the citizens take notice of maladministration in all departments2 that the parties may be left to reform themselves1 and to choose the most telling bid for popular favor2 that the parties must do this and will do this1 in so far as the public demands it1 and will not do it under any other circumstances4 ,it is the very greatest folly in the world for an agitator to be content with a partial success4 ,it destroys his cause4 ,he fades instantly4 ,you cannot see him4 ,he is become part of the corrupt and contented public4 ,his business is to make others demand good administration4 ,he must never reap1 but always sow4 ,let him leave the reaping to others4 ,there will be many of them1 and their material accomplishments will be the same whether he endorses them or not4 ,if by chance some party1 some administration gives him one hundred per cent of what he demands1 let him acknowledge it handsomely2 but he need not thank them4 ,they did it because they had to1 or because their conscience compelled them4 ,in neither case was it done for him4 ,in other words1 reform is an idea that must be taken up as a whole4 ,you do not want any specific thing4 ,you use every issue as a symbol4 ,let us give up the hope of finding any simpler way out of it4 ,let us take up the burden at its heaviest end1 and acknowledge that nothing but an increase of personal force in every ,american can change our politics4 ,it is curious that this course1 which is the shortest cut to the millennium1 should be met with the reproach that it puts off victory4 ,this is entirely due to a defect in the imagination of people who are dealing with an unfamiliar subject4 ,we have to learn its principles4 ,we know that what we really want is all of virtue2 but it seems so unreasonable to claim this1 that we try to buy it piecemeal1--item1 a schoolhouse1 item1 four parks2 and with each gain comes a sacrifice of principle1 disintegration1 discouragement4 ,fools1 if you had asked for all1 you would have had this and more4 ,we are defeated by compromise because1 no matter how much we may deceive ourselves into thinking that good government is an aggregate of laws and parks1 it is not true4 ,good government is the outcome of private virtue1 and virtue is one thing1--a unit1 a force1 a mode of motion4 ,it cannot pass through a non-conductor of casuistry at any point4 ,compromise is loss3 first1 because it stops the movement1 and kills energy2 second1 because it encourages the illusion that the wooden schoolhouse is good government4 ,as against this1 you have the fact that some hundreds of school children do get housed six months before they would have been housed otherwise4 ,but this is like cashing a draft for a thousand pounds with a dish of oatmeal4 ,we have1 perhaps1 followed in the wake of some little ,reform movement1 and it has left us with an insight into the relation between private opinion and public occurrences4 ,we have really found out two things3 first1 that in order to have better government1 the talk and private intelligence upon which it rests must be going forward all the time2 and second1 that the individual conscience1 intelligence1 or private will is always set free by the same process1--to wit1 by the telling of truth4 ,the identity between public and private life reveals itself the instant a man adopts the plan of indiscriminate truthtelling4 ,he unmasks batteries and discloses wires at every dinner-party2 he sees practical politics in every law office1 and social influence in every convention2 and wherever he is1 he suddenly finds himself1 by his own will or against it1 a centre of forces4 ,let him blurt out his opinion4 ,instantly there follows a little flash of reality4 ,the shams drop1 and the lines of human influence1 the vital currents of energy1 are disclosed4 ,the only difference between a reform movement1 so-called1 and the private act of any man who desires to better conditions1 is that the private man sets one drawing-room in a ferment by speaking his mind or by cutting his friend1 and the agitator sets ten thousand in a ferment by attacking the age4 ,as a practical matter1 the conduct of politics depends upon the dinner-table talk of men who are not in politics at all4 ,government is carried on from moment to moment by the people4 ,the executive is a mere hand and arm4 ,for instance1 there is a public excitement about ,civil ,service ,reform4 ,a law is passed and is being evaded4 ,if the governor is to set it up again1 he must be sustained by the public4 ,they must follow and understand the situation or the official is helpless4 ,but do we sustain him8 ,we do not4 ,we are half-hearted4 ,to lend power to his hand we shall have to be strong men4 ,if we now stood ready to denounce him for himself falling short by the breadth of a hair of his whole duty1 our support1 when we gave it1 would be worth having4 ,but we are starchless1 and deserve a starchless service4 ,what did you find out at the last meeting of the ,library ,committee8 ,you found out that ,commissioner ,hopkins's nephew was in the piano business2 hence the commissioner's views on the music question4 ,repeat it to the first man you meet in the street1 and bring it up at the next meeting of the committee4 ,you did not think you had much influence in town politics1 and hardly knew how to step in4 ,yet the town seems to have no time for any other subject than your attack on the commissioner4 ,from this point on you begin to understand conditions4 ,every man in town reveals his real character1 and his real relation to the town wickedness and to the universe by the way he treats you4 ,you are beginning to get near to something real and something interesting4 ,there is no one in the ,united ,states1 no matter how small a town he lives in1 or how inconspicuous he or she is1 who does not have three invitations a week to enter practical politics by such a door as this4 ,it makes no difference whether he regard himself as a scientific man studying phenomena1 or a saint purifying society2 he will become both4 ,there is no way to study sociology but this4 ,the books give no hint of what the science is like4 ,they are written by men who do not know the world1 but who go about gleaning information instead of trying experiments4 ,the first discovery we make is that the worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter1 but our educated domestic railroad president1 our prominent business man1 our leading lawyer4 ,if there is any truth in the optimistic belief that our standards are now going up1 we shall soon see proofs of it in our homes4 ,we shall not note our increase of virtue so much by seeing more crooks in ,sing ,sing1 as by seeing fewer of them in the drawing-rooms4 ,you can acquire more knowledge of ,american politics by attacking1 in open talk1 a political lawyer of social standing1 than you can in a year of study4 ,these backstair men are in every ,bar ,association and every ,reform ,club4 ,they are the agents who supervise the details of corruption4 ,they run between the capitalist1 the boss1 and the public official4 ,they know as fact what every one else knows as inference4 ,they are the priestly class of commerce1 and correspond to the intriguing ecclesiastics in periods of church ascendency4 ,some want money1 some office1 some mere power1 others want social prominence2 and their art is to play off interest against interest and advance themselves4 ,as the president of a social club ,i have a power that ,i can use against my party boss or for him4 ,if he can count upon me to serve him at need1 it is a gain to him to have me establish myself as a reformer4 ,the most dependable of these confidence men 7for they betray nobody1 and are universally used and trusted7 can amass money and stand in the forefront of social life2 and now and then one of them is made an archbishop or a foreign minister4 ,they are1 indeed1 the figure-heads of the age1 the essence of all the wickedness and degradation of our times4 ,so long as such men enjoy public confidence we shall remain as we are4 ,they must be deposed in the public mind4 ,and yet these gentlemen are the weakest point in the serried ranks of iniquity4 ,they are weak because they have social ambition1 and the place to reach them is in their clubs4 ,they are the best possible object lessons1 because everybody knows them4 ,social punishment is the one cruel reality1 the one terrible weapon1 the one judgment against which lawyers cannot protect a man4 ,it is as silent as theft1 and it raises the cry of 8,stop thief60 like a burglar alarm4 ,the general cowardice of this age covers itself with the illusion of charity1 and asks1 in the name of ,christ1 that no one's feelings be hurt4 ,but there is not in the ,new ,testament any hint that hypocrites are to be treated with charity4 ,this class is so intrenched on all sides that the enthusiasts cannot touch them4 ,their elbows are interlocked2 they sit cheek by jowl with virtue4 ,they are rich2 they possess the earth4 ,how shall we strike them8 ,very easily4 ,they are so soft with feeding on politic lies that they drop dead if you give them a dose of ridicule in a drawing-room4 ,denunciation is well enough1 but laughter is the true ratsbane for hypocrites4 ,if you set off a few jests1 the air is changed4 ,the men themselves cannot laugh or be laughed at2 for nature's revenge has given them masks for faces4 ,you may see a whole room full of them crack with pain because they cannot laugh4 ,they are angry1 and do not speak4 ,everybody in ,america is soft1 and hates conflict4 ,the cure for this1 both in politics and social life1 is the same1--hardihood4 ,give them raw truth4 ,they think they will die4 ,their friends call you a murderer4 ,four thousand ladies and eighty bank directors brought vinegar and brown paper to ,low when he was attacked1 and ,roosevelt posed as a martyr because it was said1 up and down1 that he acted the part of a selfish politician4 ,what humbug6 ,how is it that all these things grow on the same root1--fraud1 cowardice1 formality1 sentimentalism1 and a lack of humor8 ,why do people become so solemn when they are making a deal1 and so angry when they are defending it8 ,the righteous indignation expended in protecting ,roosevelt would have founded a church4 ,the whole problem of better government is a question of how to get people to stop simpering and saying 8,after you0 to cant4 ,a is an aristocrat4 ,b is a boss4 ,c is a candidate4 ,d is a distiller4 ,e is an excellent citizen4 ,they dine4 ,gloomy silence would be more respectable than this chipper concern that all shall go well4 ,is not this politics8 ,yes1 and the very essence of it4 ,is not the exposure of it practical reform8 ,how easily the arrow goes in6 ,a does not think you should confound him with ,b1 nor ,e with ,c4 ,each is a reformer when he looks to the right1 and a scamp as seen from the left4 ,what is their fault8 ,collusion4 8,but ,a means so well40 ,they all mean well4 ,let us not confound the gradations of their virtue2 but can we call any one an honest man who knowingly consorts with thieves8 ,this they all do4 ,let us declare it4 ,their resentment at finding themselves classed together drives the wedge into the clique4 ,remember1 too1 that there is no such thing as abstract truth4 ,you must talk facts1 you must name names1 you must impute motives4 ,you must say what is in your mind4 ,it is the only means you have of cutting yourself free from the body of this death4 ,innuendo will not do4 ,nobody minds innuendo4 ,we live and breathe nothing else4 ,if you are not strong enough to face the issue in private life1 do not dream that you can do anything for public affairs4 ,this1 of course1 means fight1 not to-morrow1 but now4 ,it is only in the course of conflict that any one can come to understand the system1 the habit of thought1 the mental condition1 out of which all our evils arise4 ,the first difficulty is to see the evils clearly2 and when we do see them it is like fighting an atmosphere to contend against them4 ,they are so universal and omnipresent that you have no terms to name them by4 ,you must burn a disinfectant4 ,we have observed1 thus far1 that no question is ever involved in practical agitation except truth-telling4 ,so long as a man is trying to tell the truth1 his remarks will contain a margin which other people will regard as mystifying and irritating exaggeration4 ,it is this very margin of controversy that does the work4 ,the more accurate he is1 the less he exaggerates1 the more he will excite people4 ,it is only by the true part of what is said that the interest is roused4 ,no explosion follows a lie4 ,the awaking of the better feelings of the individual man is not only the immediate but the ultimate end of all politics4 ,nor need we be alarmed at any collateral results4 ,no one has ever succeeded in drawing any valid distinction between positive and negative educational work1 except this3 that in so far as a man is positive himself1 he does positive work4 ,it is necessary to destroy reputations when they are lies4 ,peace be to their ashes4 ,but war and fire until they be ashes4 ,this is positive and constructive work4 ,you cannot state your case without using popular illustrations1 and in clearing the ground for justice and mercy1 some little great man gets shown up as a make-believe4 ,this is constructive work4 ,it is impossible to do harm to reform1 unless you are taking some course that tends to put people to sleep4 ,strangely enough1 the great outcry is made upon occasions when men are refusing to take such a course4 ,this is due to the hypnotism of self-interest4 8,don't wake us up60 they cry1 8,we cannot stand the agony of it20 and the rising energy with which they speak wakes other sleepers4 ,in the early stages of any new idea the only advertising it gets is denunciation4 ,this is so much better than silence1 that one may hail it as the dawn4 ,you must speak till you draw blood4 ,the agitators have always understood this4 ,such men as ,wendell ,phillips were not extravagant4 ,they were practical men4 ,their business was to get heard4 ,they used vitriol1 but they were dealing with the hide of the rhinoceros4 ,if you look at the work of the anti-slavery people by the light of what they were trying to do1 you will find that they had a very clear understanding of their task4 ,the reason of some of them canted a little from the strain and stress2 but they were so much nearer being right-minded than their contemporaries that we may claim them as respectable human beings4 ,they were the rock on which the old politics split4 ,they were a new force4 ,as soon as they had gathered head enough to affect political issues1 they broke every public man at the ,north by forcing him to take sides4 ,there is not a man of the era whom they did not shatter4 ,finally their own leaders got into public life1 and it was not till then that the new era began4 ,the same thing is happening to-day4 ,it is the function of the reformer to crack up any public man who dodges the issue of corruption1 or who tries to ride two horses by remaining a straight party man and shouting reform4 ,this is no one's fault4 ,it is a natural process4 ,it is fate4 ,some fall on one side of the line1 and some on the other4 ,one gets the office1 and the next loses it2 but oblivion yawns for all of them4 ,there is no cassia that can embalm their deeds2 they can do nothing interesting1 nothing that it lies in the power of the human mind to remember4 ,why is it that ,calhoun's ,speeches are unreadable8 ,he had the earnestness of a prophet and the strength almost of a ,titan2 but he was engaged in framing a philosophy to protect an interest4 ,he was maintaining something that was not true4 ,it was a fallacy4 ,it was a pretence4 ,it was a house built on the sands of temporary conditions4 ,such are the ideas of those middling good men1 who profess honesty in just that degree which will keep them in office4 ,honesty beyond this point is1 in their philosophy1 incompatible with earthly conditions4 ,these men must exist at present4 ,they are an organic product of the times2 they are samples of mediocrity4 ,but they have nothing to offer to the curiosity of the next generation4 ,no1 not though their talent was employed in protecting an ,empire--as it is now employed in eking out the supremacy of a disease in a country whose deeper health is beginning to throw the poison off4 ,our public men are confronted with two systems of politics4 ,they cannot hedge4 ,if the question were suddenly to be lost in a riot1 no doubt a good administrator might win applause1 even a ,tammany chief4 ,but we have no riots4 ,we have finished the war with ,spain1 and1 unless foreign complications shall set in1 we are about to sit down with the politicians over our domestic issue--theft4 ,are you for theft or against it8 ,you can't be both2 and your conversation1 the views you hold and express to your friends1 are the test4 ,it is only because politics affect or reflect these views that politics have any importance at all4 ,your agents--,croker1 ,hanna--are serving you faithfully now4 ,nothing else is to be heard at the clubs but the sound of little hammers riveting abuse4 99 99 99 99 99 ,there is another side to this shield that calls not for scorn but for pity4 ,have you ever been in need of money8 ,almost every man who enters our society joins it as a young man in need of money4 ,his instincts are unsullied1 his intellect is fresh and strong1 but he must live4 ,how comes it that the country is full of maimed human beings1 of cynics and feeble good men1 and outside of this no form of life except the diabolical intelligence of pure business8 ,how to make yourself needed1--it is the sycophant's problem2 and why should we expect a young ,american to act differently from a young ,spaniard at the ,court of ,philip the ,second8 ,he must get on4 ,he goes into a law office1 and if he is offended at its dishonest practices he cannot speak4 ,he soon accepts them4 ,thereafter he cannot see them4 ,he goes into a newspaper office1 the same2 a banker's1 a merchant's1 a dry-goods' shop4 ,what has happened to these fellows at the end of three years1 that their minds seem to be drying up8 ,i have seen many men ,i knew in college grow more and more uninteresting from year to year4 ,is there something in trade that desiccates and flattens out1 that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty8 ,certainly there is4 ,it is not due to trade1 but to intensity of self-seeking1 combined with narrowness of occupation4 ,if ,i had to make my way at the court of ,queen ,elizabeth1 ,i should need more kinds of wits and more knowledge of human nature than in the ,new ,york button trade4 ,no doubt ,i should be a preoccupied1 cringing1 and odious sort of person at a feudal festivity2 but ,i should be a fascinating man of genius compared to ,john ,h4 ,painter1 who at the age of thirty is making #ae1jjj a year by keeping his mouth shut and attending to business4 ,put a pressure gauge into ,painter1 and measure the business tension at ,new ,york in #aijj4 ,he is passing his youth in a trance over a game of skill1 and thereby earning the respect and admiration of all men4 ,do not blame him4 ,the great current of business force that passes through the port of ,new ,york has touched him1 and he is rigid4 ,there are hundreds of these fellows1 and they make us think of the well-meaning young man who has to support his family1 and who must compete against them for the confidence of his business patrons4 ,our standard of commercial honesty is set by that current4 ,it is entirely the result of the competition that comes from everybody's wanting to do the same thing4 8,but10 you say1 8we are here dealing with a natural force4 ,if you like1 it withers character1 and preoccupies one part of a man for so long that the rest of him becomes numb4 ,he is hard and queer4 ,he cannot write because he cannot think2 he cannot draw because he cannot think2 he cannot enter real politics because he cannot think4 ,he is all the wretch you depict him1 but we must have him4 ,such are men40 ,this is the biggest folly in the world1 and shows as deep an intellectual injury in the mind that thinks it as self-seeking can inflict4 ,business has destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except business4 ,what shall we do to diminish this awful pressure that makes politics a hell1 and wrings out our manhood1 till 7you will find7 the ,americans condone the death of their brothers and fathers who perished in home camps during the ,spanish war1 because it all happened in the cause of trade1 it was business thrift1 done by smart men in pursuance of self-interest8 ,you ask what you can do to diminish the tension of selfishness1 which is as cruel as superstition1 and which is not in one place1 but everywhere in the ,united ,states4 ,it runs a hot iron over young intellect1 and crushes character in the bud4 ,it is blindness1 palsy1 and hip disease4 ,you can hardly find a man who has not got some form of it4 ,there is no newspaper which does not show signs of it4 ,you can hardly find a man who does not proclaim it to be the elixir of life1 the vade-mecum of civilization4 ,what can you do8 ,why1 you can oppose it with other natural forces4 ,you yourself cannot turn ,niagara2 but there is not a town in ,america where one single man cannot make his force felt against the whole torrent4 ,he takes a stand on a practical matter4 ,he takes action against some abuse4 ,what does this accomplish8 ,everything4 ,how many people are there in your town8 ,well1 every one of them gets a thrill that strikes deeper than any sermon he ever heard4 ,he may howl1 but he hears4 ,the grocer's boy1 for the first time in his life1 believes that the whole outfit of morality has any place in the practical world4 ,every class contributes its comment4 ,next year a new element comes forward in politics1 as if the franchise had been extended4 ,remember this3 you cannot1 though you owned the world1 do any good in it except by devising new ways of manifesting the fact that you felt in a particular way4 ,it is the personal influence of example that is the power4 ,nothing else counts4 ,you can do harm by other methods1 but not good4 ,this influence is a natural force1 and works like steam power4 ,why all this commotion over your protest8 ,if you accuse the mayor of being a thief1 why does he not reply1 in the words of modern philosophy1 8,of course ,i'm a thief1 ,i'm made that way08 ,instead of that he resents it1 and there ensues a discussion that takes people's attention off of trade1 and qualifies the atmosphere of the place4 ,you have appreciably relieved the tension and checked the plague4 ,this whole subject must be looked at as a crusade in the cause of humanity4 ,you are making it easier for every young man in town to earn his livelihood without paying out his soul and conscience4 ,you cannot help any one man4 ,you are forced into helping them all at once4 ,every time a man asserts himself he cuts a cord that is strangling somebody4 ,the first time that independent candidates for local office were run in ,new ,york ,city1 strong men cried in the street for rage4 ,the supremacy of commerce had been affronted4 ,new ,york1 in all that makes life worth living1 is a new city since the reform movements began to break up the torpor of serfdom4 ,you asked how to fight force4 ,it must be fought with force1 and not with arguments4 ,indeed1 it is easier to start a reform and carry it through1 than it is to explain either why or how it is done4 ,you can only understand this after you have been three times ridiculed as a reformer2 and then you will begin to see that throughout the community1 running through every one1 there are currents of beneficent power that accomplish changes1 sometimes visible1 sometimes hard to see2 that this power is in its nature quite as strong1 quite as real and reliable1 as that ,wall ,street current1--terrible forces both of them1 forever operative and struggling and contending together as they surge and swell through the people4 ,it is the sight of that power for good that you need4 ,i cannot give it to you4 ,you must sink your own shaft for it4 ,it is this beneficent current passing from man to man that makes the unity of all efforts for public betterment4 ,you have a movement and an excitement over bad water1 and it leaves you with kindergartens in your schools4 ,it is this current that turns your remark at the club 7which every one repeated in order to injure you7 into a piece of encouragement to the banker's clerk1 who could not have made it himself except at the cost of his livelihood4 ,it is this current--not only the fear of it1 but the presence of it--in the heart of your merchants that leaves them at your mercy4 ,cast anything into this current and it goes everywhere1 like aniline dye put into a reservoir2 it tinges the whole local life in twenty-four hours4 ,it is to this current that all appeals are made4 ,all party platforms1 all resolutions1 all lies are dedicated to it2 all literature lives by it4 ,the head of power is near and easy if you strike directly for it4 ,there is an opinion abroad that good politics requires that every man should give his whole time to politics4 ,this is another of the superstitions disseminated by the politicians who want us to go to their primaries1 and accepted by people so ignorant of life that they believe that the temperature depends upon the thermometer4 ,why1 you are running those primaries now4 ,if you were different1 they would become different4 ,you need never go near them4 ,go into that camp where your instinct leads you4 ,the improvement in politics will not be marked by any cyclonic overturn4 ,there will always be two parties competing for your vote4 ,it takes no more time to vote for a good man than for a bad man4 ,there will be no more men in public life then than now4 ,there will be no overt change in conditions4 ,a few leaders will stand for the new forces4 ,it is true that it requires a general increase of interest on the part of every one1 in order that these men shall be found4 ,your personal duty is to support them in private and public4 ,that is all4 ,the extent to which you yourself become involved in public affairs depends upon chances with which you need not concern yourself4 ,only try to understand what is happening under your eyes4 ,every time you see a group of men advancing some cause that seems sensible1 and being denounced on all hands as 8self-appointed10 see if it was not something in yourself1 after all1 that appointed those men4 ,as we grow old1 what have we to rely on as a touchstone for the times8 ,you once had your own causes and enthusiasms1 but you cannot understand these new ones4 ,you had your certificate from the ,almighty1 but these fellows are 8self-appointed40 ,what you wanted was clear1 but these men want something unattainable1 something that society1 as you know it1 cannot supply4 ,calm yourself1 my friend2 perhaps they bring it4 ,has the great ,philosophy of ,evolution done nothing for the mind of man1 that new developments1 as they arrive1 are received with the same stony solemnity1 are greeted with the same phrases as ever8 ,how can you have the ingenuousness to argue soberly against me1 supplying me1 by every word you say1 with new illustrations1 new hope1 new fuel8 ,until ,i heard you repeat word by word the prayer-book of crumbling conservatism1 ,i was not sure ,i was right4 ,you have placed the great seal of the world upon new truth4 ,thus should it be received4 ,the radicals are really always saying the same thing4 ,they do not change2 everybody else changes4 ,they are accused of the most incompatible crimes1 of egoism and a mania for power1 indifference to the fate of their own cause1 fanaticism1 triviality1 want of humor1 buffoonery and irreverence4 ,but they sound a certain note4 ,hence the great practical power of consistent radicals4 ,to all appearance nobody follows them1 yet every one believes them4 ,they hold a tuning-fork and sound ,a1 and everybody knows it really is ,a1 though the time-honored pitch is ,g flat4 ,the community cannot get that ,a out of its head4 ,nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone so long as the real ,a is kept sounding4 ,every now and then the whole town strikes it for a week1 and all the bells ring1 and then all sinks to suppressed discord and denial4 ,the reason why we have not1 of late years1 had strong consistent centres of influence1 focuses of steady political power1 has been that the community has not developed men who could hold the note4 ,it was only when the note made a temporary concord with some heavy political scheme that the reform leaders could hear it themselves4 ,for the rest of the time it threw the whole civilization out of tune4 ,the terrible clash of interests drowned it4 ,the reformers themselves lost it1 and wandered up and down1 guessing4 ,it is imagined that nature goes by jumps1 and that a whole community can suddenly sing in tune1 after it has been caterwauling and murdering the scale for twenty years4 ,the truth is1 we ought to thank ,god when any man or body of men make the discovery that there is such a thing as absolute pitch1 or absolute honesty1 or absolute personal and intellectual integrity4 ,a few years of this spirit will identify certain men with the fundamental idea that truth is stronger than consequences1 and these men will become the most serious force and the only truly political force in their community4 ,their ambition is illimitable1 for you cannot set bounds to personal influence4 ,but it is an ambition that cannot be abused4 ,a departure from their own course will ruin any one of them in a night1 and undo twenty years of service4 ,it would be natural that such sets of men should arise all over the country1 men who 8wanted0 nothing1 and should reveal the inverse position of the ,boss ,system2 a set of moral bosses with no organizations1 no politics2 men thrown into prominence by the operation of all the forces of human nature now suppressed1 and the suppression of those now operative4 ,it is obvious that one such man will suffice for a town4 ,in the competition of character1 one man will be naturally fixed upon1 whom his competitors will be the first to honor2 and upon him will be condensed the public feeling1 the confidence of the community4 ,if the extreme case do not arise1 nevertheless it is certain that the tendencies toward a destruction of the present system1 will reveal themselves as a tendency making for the weight of personal character in practical politics4 ,reform politics is1 after all1 a simple thing4 ,it demands no great attainments4 ,you can play the game in the dark4 ,a child can understand it4 ,there are no subtleties nor obscurities1 no higher analysis or mystery of any sort4 ,if you want a compass at any moment in the midst of some difficult situation1 you have only to say to yourself1 8,life is larger than this little imbroglio4 ,i shall follow my instinct40 ,as you say this1 your compass swings true4 ,you may be surprised to find what course it points to4 ,but what it tells you to do will be practical agitation4 ,,iii ,,the ,,masses ,let us examine current beliefs on popular education1 and then thereafter let us look very closely at the work done among the poor1 and see upon what lines it has been found possible to establish influence4 ,why is it that if you go down to the ,bowery and set up a kindergarten or give a course of lectures on the ,duties of ,citizenship1 every one commends you2 whereas if you go into some abandoned district where a ,tammany thug is running for the ,state ,assembly against a ,republican heeler1 and if you put an honest man in the field against them both1 your friends call you a fool1 and say that your reform consists of mere negation8 ,who asks to see the results upon the public welfare of a night school in astronomy8 ,yet1 if you get ten mechanics to labor for six months with the fire of enthusiasm in them1 building up a radical club1 and as a result1 one hundred and fifty men cast for the first time in their lives a vote that represents the heart and conscience of each1 your intelligent friends ask1 8,what have you done8 ,you are howling against the moon40 ,why is it that if you are a grocer and refuse to sand your sugar1 you are called honest8 ,yet1 if a young politician takes this course1 it is supposed that life is not long enough for the world to discover his value2 he is a visionary4 ,in the sugar trade1 the man insisted upon dealing with the community as a whole4 ,he was not trying to sell sugar to a club1 or to benefit some district4 ,he dealt with the public4 ,now1 if a politician deals directly with the public1 we condemn him because we cannot see the empire of confidence he is building up4 ,the reason we do not see it is entirely due to historical causes4 ,we have had little experience recently in the utility of large appeals4 ,we forget their power4 ,yet we are not without examples4 ,grover ,cleveland dealt directly with the people on a great scale4 ,he established a personal relation that was stronger than party bonds4 ,this made him ,president1 preserved his character and gave reality to politics4 ,it was a bit of education to every man in the ,united ,states to see what riff-raff our political arks were made of3 a man laid his hand on the end of one of them and tore off the roof4 ,we are rather more familiar with the power of public confidence as seen in times of revolution4 ,in the year of the ,lexow investigation the people of ,new ,york ,city believed that ,dr4 ,parkhurst and ,john ,goff were in earnest4 ,there was a period of a few weeks when ,goff exercised the powers of a dictator4 ,the ,police ,commissioners had threatened to discipline a subordinate who had testified before ,goff's committee4 ,he subpoenaed them all the next morning1 and he browbeat them like school-boys4 ,they went back humbled4 ,the revelations of the summer had awakened the spirit of revolt in the masses of the people1 and it expressed itself directly as power4 ,the machinery of government was not in abeyance1 but it was seen to be a mere vehicle4 ,it could be made to work justice4 ,here were two men1 ,goff and ,parkhurst1 rendered all-powerful by the existence of popular confidence4 ,the state of mind of the community was unusual1 and the indignation soon subsided2 but it subsided to a new level1 and the abuses and inhumanity of ,boss tyranny have never since been so severe in ,new ,york4 ,our people have seen several volcanic eruptions of this sort1 and therefore they believe in them4 ,they believe in the moral power of the community1 but are afraid it can only act by convulsion4 ,they think that some new principle comes into play at such times1 something which is not a constant factor in daily government4 ,on the other hand1 we have all been trained to respect plodding methods in common education1 and we know that much can be done by kindergartens1 boys' clubs1 and propaganda to change the standards of the community and make men trust virtue4 ,we believe in the boys' club1 and we believe in the earthquake2 we forget that the same principle underlies them both4 ,when some one applies this principle to the field of political education that lies between them1 we are cynical because we have no experience4 ,apart from the lack of experience that prevents people from seeing the use of this practical activity1 there are two distressing elements that make men not want to see it4 ,in the first place1 even if you work in the ,bowery and a friend votes in ,harlem1 you are apt to be hitting his interests and prejudices4 ,and in the second place your conduct is a horrid appeal4 ,if this work is useful1 he ought to be doing it4 ,he had hoped that nothing could be done4 ,the real distinction between this particular sort of work and other philanthropy is1 that other philanthropy is preparatory drill2 this is war4 ,the other is feeding1 training1 and preaching2 this is practice4 ,now1 you may have your license to preach all you please in the vineyard1 but if you touch the soil with the spade1 you find the ground is pre-empted2 you are fighting a railroad4 ,and this condition is openly recognized in cities where the evil forces are completely dominant4 ,in lecturing before the ,university ,extension in ,pennsylvania1 you are not allowed to talk politics4 ,it is against the policy of the philanthropists who run the institution1 and who are run by the railroad4 ,the situation in ,philadelphia is merely illustrative of the distinction between philanthropy and political reform1 which is always ready to become apparent4 ,of course1 so long as the railroad distributes the philanthropy1 there will result nothing but tyranny4 ,the ,roman ,emperors gave shows to amuse the people1 and we give them talks on ,botticelli and magic-lantern pictures of the ,nile4 ,there are1 then1 real reasons why our people are slow to acknowledge the utility of militant political reform1 and why they clutch at any handle against it4 ,but we have much more to learn from the philanthropists by a study of what they have done than by dwelling on their shortcomings4 ,they have labored while the political reformers have slept2 and after many trials and many failures they have found certain working principles4 ,it was they who discovered that we cannot1 as human nature is constituted1 give strength to any one except by helping the whole man to develop at once4 ,we must give him a chance to grow4 ,the workers among the poor have long ago seen the futility of any effort except that of raising the general standards of living4 ,they have established ,settlements1 where the relation between the settlers and the surrounding population is as natural as family life and as perennial as ,tammany ,hall4 ,after ten years of experiment this has been done in many places4 ,if you will go to one of these places and study exactly what has happened in the line of benefit to the people1 you will see that it has resulted wholly from personal influence1--that is to say1 from the effect of character upon character4 8,two years ago we established a boys' club1 and soon afterwards a kindergarten4 ,the boys returned one day1 and out of jealousy smashed everything belonging to the kindergarten1 and piled the rubbish in the middle of the room4 ,last week a barrel of fruit was sent here for the sick and weakly1 and we left the barrel open with a card on the outside to that effect4 ,you could not get the boys to touch the fruit4 ,now1 if you ask me what system or what part of the system has caused the change in these boys1 ,i don't know40 ,this is reform politics1 but unless you and ,i go there and make a place for these boys in practical politics1 they will find waiting for them nothing but the caucus and the job4 ,they will relapse and forget4 ,it is throwing effort into the sea to train the young if you stop there4 ,the test comes when the scaffoldings of early life are taken down4 ,each man meets the world alone4 ,the tragedies of character occur at this period4 ,we must make a camp and standing ground for grown men4 ,so far as the hope of political purity goes1 there are acres of this city that are in a worse condition than health was in before the era of hospitals4 ,fly over them as the crow flies1 and you cannot find a centre of downright antagonism to evil4 ,the population does not know that such a thing exists2 and yet1 if you propose to go there and set up a fight against both parties1--that is to say1 a fight against wickedness1--you are told by patriots and doctors of divinity1 8,don't do it unless you can win4 ,you will disgust people with reform40 ,it is awful and at the same time ludicrous to hear an educated person maintain this doctrine and in the same breath mourn over the corruption of the masses4 ,the man throws his own dark shadow over them and bewails their want of light4 ,he doubts the power of personal influence2 and yet there is absolutely no other force for good in the world1 and never has been4 ,let us stick to facts4 ,take individual cases of improvement and see what power has been at work4 ,you will find that you disclose behind any personal improvement1 not a ballot law or an organization1 but a human being4 ,the movement for political reform goes into the ,bowery in the wake of the philanthropists4 ,we go there knowing something about practical politics4 ,we know1 for instance1 that the ,bowery is the geographical name for a district which is really governed by the same forces as ,fifth ,avenue4 ,to think that the politics of the ,bowery are controlled by the ,bowery is about as sensible as to believe that the politics of ,irkutsk are controlled at ,irkutsk4 ,we have got1 first1 to disclose the machinery of evil and then to fight it wherever we find it1 even though it lead us into churches4 ,nothing is needed in any ,tammany club on the ,bowery that is not needed ten times as much in the ,union ,league ,club on ,fifth ,avenue--personal self-sacrifice for principle in a cause which is apparently hopeless4 ,unless you go there displaying that1 you are not needed4 ,our intercourse with the laboring man is a great teacher to ourselves4 ,that is its main use4 ,it brings out1 as nothing else can1 the magnitude and perfection of the system1 whose visible top and little flag we can always see1 but whose dimensions and ramifications nothing but experiment can reveal2 philosophy could not guess it4 ,here is a laborer on the street railroad4 ,in order to get work he must show a ticket from the party boss4 ,it is his passport from the ,czar1 countersigned by the proper official2 otherwise he gets no job4 ,here is a young notary whom you employ to carry about the certificate that puts an independent candidate in nomination4 ,you try to get him to sign the thing himself and join your club4 ,it is no use asking4 ,his brother did it once and lost his place2 so close is the scrutiny1 so rapid the punishment4 ,examine the retail grocer1 or the tobacconist1 or the cobbler2 go into particulars with him1 and you will find that his unwillingness to join your movement does not spring so directly from his inability to see the point of it1 as from fear of the direct and immediate consequences to himself4 ,we wanted to elevate the masses1 but it turns out1 as the philanthropists discerned long ago1 that there are no masses in ,america1 there are no masses in ,new ,york ,city4 ,we can discover only individuals1 who are each controlled by individual interests1 by various and subtle considerations4 ,these men are in chains to other men1 who often live in other parts of the city4 ,the attorneys and merchants1 the business world in fact1 is found to be in league with abuse4 ,the man who signs the laborer's license to work reports twice a day to a big contractor who is director in a bank whose president owns the opera house and endowed the sailors' home4 ,he built the yacht club1 is vestryman in the biggest church1 and is revered by all men4 ,the title-deeds and registry books of all visible wealth1 show the names of his intimate friends4 ,all we can do in the way of weakening the chains is to expose them2 this cruelty is largely ignorance4 ,the beneficiaries must be made to see the sources of their wealth4 ,it is pre-occupation with business1 not coldness of heart1 that conceals the conditions4 ,the ,american business man is a warm-hearted being4 ,he does not even care for money1 but for the game of business4 ,as matters now stand in ,america1 we see this condition1--that it is for the immediate interest of the dominant class1 namely1 the politico-financial class1 to keep the people as selfish as possible4 ,we have examined the subtle strains of influence and prejudice by which this commercial interest has been extended1 until1 as a practical matter1 it is almost impossible for a man to get word to the laboring classes that there exists such a thing as political morality4 ,some professional philanthropist always stands ready to prevent the signal of honesty from being raised2 some set of ,sunday citizens interposes to stop the unwise1 inexpedient1 foolhardy attempt to be independent of rascality4 ,and when you do succeed in reaching the mechanic1 what can you do for him8 ,tell him to be a man1 and strike off the shackles that bind him4 ,here we are1 as helpless before the poor as before the rich1 facing both of them with the same query1 8,can you not see that your own concession1 call it poverty1 or call it poverty of will1 is one element of this oppression80 ,the difference between the poor and the financial classes is one of spiritual complexity4 ,the promoters are well-to-do because their minds have been able to grasp and utilize the complex forces made up of the minds of their simpler fellow-beings4 ,and this astuteness leaves them less open to unselfish emotions than the laboring man4 ,his nature is more intact4 ,he is a more emotional and instinctive being4 ,it is for this reason that moral reforms have come from the lower strata of society4 ,the people have as much to lose as the bankers1 but they are more ready to lose it4 ,the head of moral feeling in the community has got to grow strong enough to force the financier to take his clutch off the laboring man1 before you can reach the laboring man4 ,and yet labor itself will contribute more than its share towards this head of moral feeling2 and therefore you must go among the laboring classes with your ideas and your propaganda4 ,but beware lest you give him a stone for bread4 ,you can do no more for a man because you call yourself a 8politician0 than if you were a mere philanthropist4 ,a man's standards of political thought are but a small fraction of his general standards1 and unless your sense of truth is as sharp as a sword you had better not come near the laboring man4 ,the point here made is--and it is of great importance--that we candidly acknowledge at every instant the nature of our undertaking and the nature of our power1 for in so far as we mistake them we weaken our practical utility4 ,it is not as the agent of any institution that you are here1 but as the agent of conscience at the dictation of personal feeling4 ,do you need proof that you yourself draw all your power from sheer moral influence8 ,note what you do when you start your club4 ,you go to the nearest well-to-do person and ask for money for rent4 ,he gives it to you out of his fund of general benevolence4 ,to whom do you really want to distribute this benevolence8 ,to every one4 ,you feel that by passing it on through a group and series of boys and young men you can benefit the whole country4 ,you use them as a mere vehicle4 ,you know that you can only help them by getting them to help others4 ,your appeal for clients then goes out to the whole district4 ,your club puts you in communication with every man in it4 ,in teaching your club or in exhorting any mortal to good behavior1 what method1 what stimulus1 do you use8 ,whether you know it or not1 you are really drawing support from every one who is following the same principle1 all over the city1 all over the country1 all over the world4 ,do you not ceaselessly appeal to the examples of ,washington and ,lincoln1 to the books and conduct of men whose aims were your aims8 ,or take your own case4 ,why do you occupy yourself with this thing8 ,this activity satisfies your demands upon life2 nothing else does4 ,you are the creature of a thousand influences1 and if you begin to trace them you find that you are fulfilling the will of ,toynbee1 of ,john ,stuart ,mill1 of ,kant4 ,you are a disciple of ,tolstoi4 ,you were inspired by ,william ,lloyd ,garrison4 ,it is they1 as much as you1 who are doing this work4 ,it is they who formulated the ideas and impressed them upon you4 ,your great friends are the founders of religions4 ,examine the actual persons who give you practical help4 ,you will find ,moses1 you will find ,christ behind them4 ,what you are using is the world's fund of unselfishness4 ,it is necessary to employ the whole of it in order to accomplish anything1 however small4 ,as a practical matter1 every one does employ the whole of it every time he even thinks of reform4 ,now1 just as we can trace the sources of our power in the great currents of human feeling that flow down to us out of the past2 so we can foresee the accomplishments of that power in enlarging the lives of men who come after us4 ,we are sinking the foundations of a new politics4 ,you cannot always see every stone1 but it has gone to its place4 ,it is impossible to take a stand for what you think is a true theory without thereby becoming an integral factor for good in every man who hears of it4 ,it is impossible to be that factor without taking that stand4 ,what is the nature of the good you can do to the laboring man8 ,his mind analyzes you in a flash4 ,if he is influenced by you1 you may be sure that it is by something in you that you had not intended to give him4 ,after the man has seen you1 he has been moved by you2 but how8 ,consult your own remembrance4 ,what incident of character impressed you most when you were a child8 ,do you remember any act1 any expression or gesture or anecdote or speech1 that had a lasting influence upon you8 ,now ,i ask you this3 ,was it done for you8 ,were you the designed beneficiary of it8 ,was it not rather the silent part of some one else's conduct1 a thing you were perhaps not meant to see at all8 ,and this was no accident4 ,this is the natural history of influence2 it passes unconsciously from life to life4 ,we must take the world as we find it4 ,we must deal with human nature according to the laws of human nature4 ,our politics are at present so artificial that the average man thinks that the name 8politics0 prevents the well established and familiar principles of human nature from being operative4 ,but he is wrong4 ,man has never yet succeeded in inventing any system that could evade them or affect them in the least4 ,all the political organization of reform is already in existence1 and needs only strengthening and developing4 ,it is all in use1 and every one understands its use and knows its headquarters and its agencies4 ,it is all individual character and courage1 and with the growth of character and courage it will become more defined and visible every day4 ,,iv ,,literature ,there are feelings and views about life1 there are conviction and insight1 which come from thinking at a high rate of speed1 and vanish when the machinery moves slowly and the blood ebbs4 ,the world not only accepts the intensity of the writer1 but demands it4 ,nevertheless1 the world has an imperfect knowledge as to where this intensity comes from1 how it is produced1 or what relation it bears to ugliness and falsehood4 8,what a pleasure it must be to you10 said ,rothschild to ,heine1 8to be able to turn off those little songs60 ,in our ordinary moods we regard the conclusions of the poets as both true and untrue1--true to feeling1 untrue to fact2 true as intimations of the next world or of some lost world2 untrue here1 because detached from those portions of society that are perennially visible4 ,most men have a duplicate philosophy which enables them to love the arts and the wit of mankind1 at the same time that they conveniently despise them4 ,life is ugly and necessary2 art is beautiful and impossible4 8,the farther you go from the facts of life1 the nearer you get to poetry4 ,the practical problem is to keep them in separate spheres1 and to enjoy both40 ,the hypothesis of a duplicity in the universe explains everything1 and staves off all claims and questionings4 ,such are the convictions of the average cultivated man4 ,his back is broken1 but he lives in the two halves comfortably enough4 ,he has to be protected at his weak spot1 of course1 and that spot is the present2 ten years from now1 to-morrow1 yesterday1 the day of judgment1 the ,state of ,pennsylvania1--all these you are welcome to4 ,every form of idealism appeals to him1 so long as it does not ask him to budge out of his armchair4 8,aha10 he says1 8,i understand this4 ,it takes its place in the realm of the ,imagination40 ,this man does not know1 and has no means of knowing1 that good books are only written by men whose backs are not broken1 and whose vital energy circulates through their entire system in one sweep4 ,they have a unitary and not a duplicate philosophy4 ,the present is their strong point4 ,the actualities of life are their passion4 ,they lay a bold hand upon everything within their reach1 for they see it with new sight4 ,the glitter of the past makes us think of literature as embodied in books2 but to understand literature we must fix our minds on authors1 not on books4 ,the men who write--what makes them write well or ill8 ,what are the conditions that breed poetry1 or music1 or architecture8 ,the current beliefs about art and letters are fatalistic4 ,it is supposed that poets and artists crop up now and then1 and that nothing can stop them2 they need no aid1 they conquer circumstances4 ,i do not believe it4 ,we see no analogy to it in nature4 ,among the plants and the fishes we see nothing but a wholesale and incredible destruction of germs on all sides4 ,it seems a miracle that any seed should fall upon good ground1 and be sheltered till it come to the flower4 ,why should the percentage of germs that come to maturity be greater with genius than it is with the eggs of the sturgeon8 ,the enemies of each are numerous4 ,if it were not for the fecundity of nature1 we should have none of either of them4 ,and how is it that the great man always happens to be young at the very moment when some events are going forward that ripen his powers2 so that he grows up with his time1 and does something that is comprehensible to all time8 ,the answer is1 that all eras are sown thick with the seeds of genius1 which for the most part die1 but in a favoring age mature to greatness4 ,must we resort to a theory of special creation to explain the great talents of the world8 ,and even this would not explain our own welcome and our own comprehension of them when they come4 ,if it were not for the undeveloped powers1 the seeds of genius1 in ourselves1 ,plato and ,bach would be meaningless1 and ,christ would have died in vain4 ,it must be that thousands of good intellects perish annually4 ,the men do not die1 but their powers wither1 or rather never mature4 ,art1 like everything else1 represents an escape1 a survival4 ,in any age that lacks it1 or is weak in it1 we may look about for the enginery by which it is crushed4 ,in looking into a past age we are put to inference and conjecture4 ,we see the mark of fetters upon the ,byzantine soul1 and we begin dredging the dark waters of history for a metaphysical cause4 ,we cannot walk into a ,byzantine shop and watch the apprentice at work4 ,but in our own time we can see the whole process in action4 ,we can study our modern ,inquisitions at leisure1 and note every mark that is made upon a soul that is passing through them4 ,it does not involve any indignity to the pretensions of literature if we walk into that great bazaar1 modern journalism1 and see what is going on there behind the counters4 ,here is a factory of popular art4 ,it is not the whole of letters2 but it has an influence on the whole of letters4 ,the press fills the consciousness of the people4 ,a modern community breathes through its press4 ,journalism1 to be sure1 is a region of letters1 where all the factors for truth are at a special and peculiar discount4 ,its attention is given to near and ugly things1 to mean quarrels1 business interests1 and special ends4 ,every country shows up badly here4 ,the hypocrisy of the press is the worst thing in ,england4 ,it is the worst exhibition of ,england's worst fault4 ,the press of ,france gives you ,france at her weakest4 ,the press of ,america gives you ,america at her cheapest4 ,perhaps the study of journalism in any country would illustrate the peculiar vices of that country2 and it is fair to remember this in examining our own press4 ,but examine it we must1 for it is important4 ,the subject includes more than the daily newspapers4 ,those ephemeral sheets that flutter from the table into the waste-paper basket1 which are something more than mere newspapers and less than magazines1 and the magazines themselves1 which are more than budgets of gossip and less than books1 make up a perpetual rain of paper and ink4 ,thousands of people are engaged in writing them1 and millions in reading them4 ,this whole species of literature is typical of the age2 let us see how it is conducted4 ,a journal is a meeting-place between the forces of intellect and of commerce4 ,the men who become editors always bear some relation to the intellectual interests of the country4 ,they make money1 but they make it by understanding the minds of people who are not taking money1 but thought1 from the exchanges that the editors set up4 ,a magazine or a newspaper is a shop4 ,each is an experiment and represents a new focus1 a new ratio between commerce and intellect4 ,even trade journals have columns devoted to general information and jokes4 ,the one thing a journal must have in order to be a journal is circulation4 ,it must be carried into people's houses1 and this is brought about by an impulse in the buyer4 ,the buyer has many opinions and modes of thought that he does not draw from the journal1 and he is always ready to drop a journal that offends him4 ,an editor is thus constantly forced to choose between affronting his public and placating his public4 ,now1 whatever arguments may be given for his taking one course or the other1 it remains clear that in so far as an editor is not publishing what he himself thinks of interest for its own sake1 he is encouraging in the public something else besides intellect4 ,he is subserving financial1 political1 or religious bias1 or1 it may be1 popular whim4 ,he is1 to this extent at least1 the custodian and protector of prejudice4 ,the thrift of an editor-owner1 who is building up the circulation of a paper1 tends to keep him conservative4 ,repetition is safer than innovation4 ,an especially strong temptation is spread before the ,american editor in the shape of an enormous reading public1 made up of people who have a common-school education1 and who resemble each other very closely in their traits of mind4 ,there is money to be made by any one who discerns a new way of reinforcing any prejudice of the ,american people4 ,it has come about very naturally during the last thirty years1 that journalism has been developed in ,america as one of the branches in the science of catering to the masses on a gigantic scale4 ,the different kinds of conservatism have been banked1 consolidated1 and1 as it were1 marshalled under the banners of as many journals4 ,money and energy have been expended in collecting these vast audiences1 and sleepless vigilance is needed to keep them together4 ,the great investments in the good will of millions are nursed by editors who live by their talents1 and who in another age would have been intellectual men4 ,the highest type of editor now extant in ,america will as frankly regret his own obligation to cater to mediocrity1 as the business man will regret his obligation to pay blackmail1 or as the citizen will regret his obligation to vote for one of the parties4 8,there is nothing else to do4 ,i am dealing with the money of others4 ,there are not enough intelligent people to count40 ,he serves the times4 ,the influence thus exerted by the public 7through the editor7 upon the writer tends to modify the writer and make him resemble the public4 ,it is a spiritual pressure exerted by the majority in favor of conformity4 ,this exists in all countries1 but is peculiarly severe in countries and ages where the majority is made up of individuals very similar to each other4 ,the tyranny of a uniform population always makes itself felt4 ,if any man doubt the hide-bound character of our journals to-day1 let him try this experiment4 ,let him write down what he thinks upon any matter1 write a story of any length1 a poem1 a prayer1 a speech4 ,let him assume1 as he writes it1 that it cannot be published1 and let him satisfy his individual taste in the subject1 size1 mood1 and tenor of the whole composition4 ,then let him begin his peregrinations to find in which one of the ten thousand journals of ,america there is a place for his ideas as they stand4 ,we have more journals than any other country4 ,the whole field of ideas has been covered2 every vehicle of opinion has its policy1 its methods1 its precedents4 ,a hundred will receive him if he shaves this1 pads that1 cuts it in half2 but not one of them will trust him as he stands1 8,good1 but eccentric10 8,good1 but too long10 8,good1 but new40 ,let us follow the steps of this withering influence4 ,a young illustrator does an etching that he likes4 ,he is told to reduce it to the conventional standard4 ,this is easy1 but what is happening in the process8 ,he blurs the fine edges of vision1 not only on the plate1 but in his own mind4 ,the real injury to intellect is not done in the editorial sanctum4 ,it is done in the mind of the writer who himself attempts to cater to the prejudice of others4 ,a man rewrites a scene in a story to please a public4 ,in order to do this he is obliged to forget what his story was about4 ,he is talking by rote2 he is making an imitation4 ,does this seem a small thing8 ,let any one do it once and see where it leads him4 ,the attitude of the whole human being towards his whole life is changed by the experience4 ,do it twice1 and you can hardly shake off the practice4 ,write and publish six editorials for the 8,universalist10 and then sit down to write one not in the style of the 8,universalist40 ,you will find it1 practically1 an impossibility4 ,the notable lack in our literature is this3 the prickles and irregularities of personal feeling have been pumice-stoned away4 ,it is too smooth4 ,there is an absence of individuality1 of private opinion4 ,this is the same lack that curses our politics1--the absence of private opinion4 ,the sacrifice in political life is honesty1 in literary life is intellect2 but the closer you examine honesty and intellect the more clearly they appear to be the same thing4 ,suppose that a judge1 in order to please a boss1 awards ,parson ,jones' cow to ,deacon ,brown2 does he boldly admit this even to himself8 ,never4 ,he writes an able opinion in which he befogs his intelligence1 and convinces himself that he has arrived at his award by logical steps4 ,in like manner1 the revising editor who reads with the eyes of the farmer's daughter begins to lose his own4 ,he is extinguishing some sparks of instructive reality which would offend--and benefit--the farmer's daughter2 and he is obliterating a part of his own mind with every stroke of his blue pencil4 ,he is devitalizing literature by erasing personality4 ,he does this in the money interests of a syndicate2 but the debasing effect upon character is the same as if it were done at the dictate of the ,german ,emperor4 ,the harm done in either case is intellectual4 ,take another example4 ,a reporter writes up a public meeting1 but colors it with the creed of his journal4 ,can he do this acceptably without abjuring his own senses8 ,he is competing with men whose every energy is bent on seeing the occasion as the newspaper wishes it seen4 ,consider the immense difficulty of telling the truth on the witness stand1 and judge whether good reporting is easy4 ,the newspaper trade1 as now conducted1 is prostitution4 ,it mows down the boys as they come from the colleges4 ,it defaces the very desire for truth1 and leaves them without a principle to set a clock by4 ,they grow to disbelieve in the reality of ideas4 ,but these are our future literati1 our poets and essayists1 our historians and publicists4 ,the experts who sit in the offices of the journals of the country have so long used their minds as commercial instruments1 that it never occurs to them to publish or not publish anything1 according to their personal views4 ,they do not know that every time they subserve prejudice they are ruining intellect4 ,if there were an editor who had any suspicion of the way the world is put together1 he would respect talent as he respects honor4 ,it would be impossible for him to make his living by this traffic4 ,if he knew what he was doing1 he would prefer penury4 ,these men1 then1 have not the least idea of the function they fulfil4 ,no more has the agent of the ,insurance ,company who corrupts a legislature4 ,the difference in degree between the two iniquities is enormous1 because one belongs to that region in the scale of morality which is completely understood1 and the other does not4 ,we do not excuse the insurance agent2 we will not allow him to plead ignorance4 ,he commits a penal offence4 ,we will not allow selfishness to trade upon selfishness and steal from the public in this form4 ,but what law can protect the public interest in the higher faculties8 ,what statute can enforce artistic truth8 ,we actually forbid a man by statute to sell his vote1 because a vote is understood to be an opinion1 a thing dependent on rational and moral considerations4 ,you cannot buy and sell it without turning it into something else4 ,the exercise of that infinitesimal fraction of public power represented by one man's vote is hedged about with penalties2 because the logic of practical government has forced us to see its importance4 ,but the harm done to a community by the sale of a vote does not follow by virtue of the statute1 but by virtue of a law of influence of which the statute is the recognition4 ,the same law governs the sale of any opinion1 whether it be conveyed in a book review or in a political speech1 in a picture of life and manners1 a poem1 a novel1 or an etching4 ,there is no department of life in which you can lie for private gain without doing harm4 ,the grosser forms of it give us the key to the subtler ones1 and the jail becomes the symbol of that condition into which the violation of truth will shut any mind4 ,so far as any man comes directly in contact with the agencies of organized literature1 let him remember that his mind is at stake4 ,they can change you1 but you cannot change them1 except by changing the public they reflect4 ,the faculties of man are as strong as steel if properly used1 but they are like the down on a peach if improperly used4 ,what shall a man take in exchange for his soul8 ,no man has the privilege upon this earth of being more than one person4 ,in this matter of expression1 it is the last ten per cent of accuracy that saves or sells you4 ,talent evaporates as easily as a delegate holds his tongue or a lawyer smiles to a rich man2 and the injury is irremediable4 ,let a man not alter a line or cut a paragraph at the suggestion of an editor4 ,those are the very words that are valuable4 8,ah10 you say1 8but ,i need criticism40 ,then go to a critic4 ,consult the man who is farthest away from this influence1 some one who cannot read the magazines1 some one who does not have to read them4 ,your public1 when you get one1 will qualify the general public2 but you must reach it as a whole man4 ,the writer's course is easy compared to that of the reform politician1 because printing is cheap4 ,he will get heard immediately4 ,he covers the whole of the ,united ,states while the other is canvassing a ward4 ,literary self-assertion is as much needed as any of the virtue we pray for in politics4 ,a resonant and unvexed independence makes a man's words stir the fibres in other men2 and it matters little whether you label his words literature or politics4 ,the difficulty in any revolt against custom1 the struggle a man has in getting his mind free from the cobwebs of restraint1 always turns out to involve financial distress2 and this holds true of the writer's attempt to override the senseless restrictions of the press4 ,the magazines pay handsomely1 and pay at once4 ,a writer must earn his bread2 a man must support his family4 ,we accept this necessity with such a hearty concurrence1 and the necessity itself becomes so sacred1 that it seems to imply an answer to all ethical and artistic questions4 ,we almost think that nature will connive at malpractice done in so good a cause as the support of a family4 ,the subject must be looked at more narrowly4 ,the spur of poverty is popularly regarded not only as an excuse for all bad work1 but as a prerequisite to all good work4 ,there is a misconception in this wholesale appropriation of a partial truth4 ,the economic laws are valuable and suggestive1 but they are founded on the belief that a man will pursue his own business interests exclusively4 ,this is never entirely true even in trade1 and the doctrines of the economists become more and more misleading when applied to fields of life where the money motive becomes incidental4 ,the law of supply and demand does not govern the production of sonnets4 ,let us lay aside theory and observe the effects of want upon the artist and his work4 ,as a stimulus to the whole man1 a prod to get him into action and keep him active1 the spur of poverty is a blessing4 ,but if it enter into the detail of his attention1 while he is at work1 it is damnation4 ,a man at work is like a string that is vibrating4 ,touch it with a feather and it is numb4 ,a singer will sing flat if he sees a friend in the audience4 ,even a trained and cold-blooded lawyer who is trying a case1 will not be at his best if he is watched by some one whom he wants to impress4 ,the artist is the easiest of all men to upset4 ,he is dealing with subtle and fluid things1--memories1 allusions1 associations4 ,it is all gossamer and sunlight when he begins4 ,it is to be gossamer and sunlight when he is finished4 ,but in the interim it is bricks and mortar1 rubble and white lead4 ,and the writer--,i do not say that he must be more free from cares than the next man--but he must not let into the mint and forge of his thought some immaterial and petty fact about himself1 for this will make him self-conscious4 ,consider how ingenuous1 how unexpected1 how natural is good conversation4 ,at one moment you have nothing to say1 at the next a vista of ideas has opened4 ,they come crowding in1 and the telling of them reveals new vistas4 ,it is the same with the writer4 ,in the process of writing the story is made4 ,there is really nothing to say or do in the world until you make your start1 and then the significance begins to steam out of the materials4 ,and here1 in the act and heat of creation1 to have the cold fear thrust in1 8,i cannot use that phrase because the editor will think it too strong10 is enough to chill the brain of ,rabelais4 ,human nature cannot stand such handling4 ,do this to a man and you break his spirit4 ,he becomes tame1 calculating1 and ingenious4 ,his powers are frozen4 ,it is impossible not to see in contemporary journalism a slaughter-house for mind4 ,here we have a great whale that browses on the young and eats them by thousands4 ,this is the seamy side of popular education4 ,the low level of the class at the dame's school keeps the bright boys back and makes dunces of them4 ,we have been dealing in all this matter with one of the deepest facts of life1 to wit1 the influence that society at large has in cutting down and narrowing the development of the individual4 ,the newspaper business displays the whole operation very vividly2 but we may see the same thing happening in the other walks of life4 ,there arrives a time in the career of most men when their powers become fixed4 ,men seem to expand to definite shapes1 like those ,japanese cuttings that open out into flowers and plants when you drop them into warm water4 ,after reaching his saturation point each man fills his niche in society and changes little4 ,he goes on doing whatever he was engaged upon at the time he touched his limit4 ,we almost believe that every man has his predestinate size and shape1 and that some obscure law of growth arrests one man at thirty and the next at forty years of age4 ,this is partly true2 but the law is not obscure4 ,it is not because the men stop growing that they repeat themselves1 but they stop growing because they repeat themselves4 ,they cease to experiment2 they cease to search4 ,the lawyer adopts routine methods2 the painter follows up his success with an imitation of his success2 the writer finds a recipe for style or plot4 ,every one saves himself the trouble of re-examining the contents of his own mind4 ,he has the best possible reason for doing this4 ,the public will not pay for his experiments as well as it will for his routine work4 ,but the laws of nature are deaf to his reasons4 ,research is the price of intellectual growth4 ,if you face the problems of life freshly and squarely each morning1 you march4 ,if you accept any solution as good enough1 you drop4 ,for there is no finality and ending place to intellect4 ,examine any bit of politics1 any law-case1 or domestic complication1 until you understand your own reasons for feeling as you do about it4 ,then write the matter down carefully and conclusively1 and you will find that you have done no more than restate the problem in a new form4 ,the more complete your exposition1 the more loudly it calls for new solution4 ,the masterly analysis of ,tolstoi1 his accurate explanations1 his diagnosis and dissection of human life1 leave us with a picture of society that for unsolved mystery competes with the original4 ,but the point lies here4 ,you must lay bare your whole soul in the statement you make4 ,you must resolutely set down everything that touches the matter4 ,until you do this1 the question refuses to assume its next shape4 ,you cannot flinch and qualify in your first book1 and speak plainly in your second4 ,it is the act of utterance that draws out the powers in a man and makes him a master of his own mind4 ,without the actual experience of writing ,lohengrin1 ,wagner could not have discovered ,parsifal4 ,the works of men who are great enough to get their whole thought uttered at each deliverance1 form a progression like the deductions of a mathematician4 ,these men are never satisfied with a past accomplishment4 ,their eyes are on questions that beckon to them from the horizon4 ,their faculties are replenished with new energy because they seek4 ,they are driving their ploughs through a sea of thought1 intent1 unresting1 resourceful1 creative4 ,they are discoverers1 and just to the extent that lesser men are worth anything they are discoverers too4 ,beauty and elevation flash from the currents set up by intense speculation4 ,beauty is not the aim of the writer4 ,his aim must be truth4 ,but beauty and elevation shine out of him while he is on the quest4 ,his mind is on the problem2 and as he unravels it and displays it1 he communicates his own spirit1 as it were incidentally1 as it were unwittingly1 and this is the part that goes out from him and does his work in the world4 ,v ,,principles ,speech is a very small part of human intercourse4 ,indeed speech is often not connected with the real currents of intercourse4 ,a comic actor has made you happy before he has uttered a word4 ,this is by the responsive vibration of your apparatus to his4 ,the external speech and gesture help the transfer of power1 and that is all they do4 ,the communion1 upon whatever plane of being it takes place1 is a contagion1 and goes forward by leaps and darts1 like the action of frost on a window-pane4 ,an angry friend comes into my room1 and before he has uttered a word ,i am in a blaze of anger4 ,a baby too young to speak does some naughty thing4 ,i remonstrate with him in a rational way4 ,perhaps ,i repeat to him ,kant's maxim from the ,critique of ,practical ,reason4 ,the child understands at once and is grateful for the treatment4 ,now1 observe this1 that if ,i said the same thing to a grown man in the same tone1 it would be to the tone and not to the argument that he would respond4 ,the exchange of energy between man and man is so rapid that language becomes a bystander4 ,it is like the passage of the electrical current1--we receive an impression or a message1 or twenty messages at once4 ,all this is the result of suggestion and inference4 ,no strange phenomenon is here alluded to4 ,the situation is the normal and constant situation whenever two human beings meet4 ,the only mystery about it is that our senses should be so much more acute than we knew4 ,ask a man to dinner and talk to him about the ,suez ,canal1 and the next morning your wife will be apt to give a truer account of him than you can give4 ,she has been knitting in the corner and thinking about the best place to buy children's shoes1 but she knows which coils in her brain have been played upon by the brain of the stranger4 ,the reason your wife knows that your ,suez friend is no saint1 is that she feels that certain strings of the benevolent harp that is sounding in herself are not being reinforced4 ,there are dead notes in him4 ,the sensitiveness of children is so common a thing that we forget its explanation4 ,it is just because the child cannot follow the argument1 that he is free from the illusion that the argument is the main point4 ,the lobes of his brain get a shock and respond to it ingenuously4 ,these facts have been neglected by philosophers1 because the facts defy formulation4 ,you cannot get them into a statement4 ,they are life4 ,but in the practical1 workaday world1 they have always been understood4 ,men of action owe their success to the habit of using their minds and bodies in a direct way4 ,men in every profession rely upon the accuracy of direct impressions4 ,the great doctor1 or the great general1 or the great business man uses the whole of his sensibilities in each act of reading a man4 ,there is no other way to read him correctly4 ,people whose brains are preoccupied with formulated knowledge are not apt to be as good judges of character as spontaneous persons4 ,their thoughts are on logic4 ,they follow what is said4 ,a very small fraction of them is alive4 ,they are like chess-players who are not listening to the opera4 ,the answer to any question in psychology always lies under our hand4 ,we have only to ask what the normal man does4 ,it will be found that he uses his faculties according to their nature1 though it may be1 he is embryonic and inarticulate4 ,we speak of great men as 8simple10 because they retain a sensitiveness to immediate impressions very common in uneducated persons and in children4 ,their thought subserves the direct currents of suggestion4 ,their instincts rule them4 ,their minds serve them4 ,they are great because of this power to read the thoughts of others through the pores of their skin1 and answer blindfold to unuttered appeals1 whether of weakness or of strength4 ,to do this means intellect1 whether in ,napoleon or ,gladstone4 ,every pianist and public speaker1 every actor and singer knows that his whole art consists in getting his intellectual apparatus into focus1 so that the vibrations of his formulated thought shall correspond and fall in with the direct and spontaneous vibrations of his audience4 ,this is truth1 this is the discovery of law1 this is art4 ,men are profound and complicated creatures1 and when any one of them expresses the laws of his construction and reveals his own natural history1 he is called a genius4 ,but he is a genius solely because he is comprehensible1 and others say of him1 8,i am like that40 ,his suggestions carry4 ,their extreme subtlety baffles analysis1 just as the suggestions of real life baffle analysis4 ,the miracle of reality in art is due to refinement of suggestion4 ,we cannot follow its steps or say how it is done4 ,we see only the idea4 ,shakespeare gives you all the meaning1 and none of the means4 ,this is first-class artificial communication4 ,it almost competes with the every-day1 commonplace1 familiar transfer of the incommunicable essence of life from man to man4 ,our present problem is1 how to influence people for their good4 ,it is clear that when you and another man meet1 the personal equation is the controlling thing4 ,if you are more high-minded than he1 the way to influence him is to stick to your own beliefs2 for they alone can keep you high-minded4 ,they alone can make you vibrate4 ,it is they and not you that will do the work4 ,there you stand1 and there he stands2 and you can only qualify him by the ideas that control you4 ,it makes no difference whether you are an emperor and he a peasant1 or you a ,good ,government ,club man and he a merchant1 the same forces are at work4 ,shift your ground1 and he feels the shift2 you are encouraging him to be shifty1 like yourself4 ,what can you do for him except to follow your conscience8 ,but this is equally true of every meeting of all men everywhere4 ,you address a labor meeting and talk about the ,philippines4 ,you meet the ,turkish ,ambassador and talk about ,kipling's poems4 ,you talk to your son about kite-flying4 ,to each of these contacts with another's mind you bring the same power4 ,if you start with the psychical value of #f1 no matter what you do1 a cross-section of your whole activity in the world will at any instant of time read #f4 ,it may be that a page of ciphering cannot express the formula1 but it will mean #f4 ,the immense amount of thought that man has given1 during the last few thousand years1 to his social arrangements and his destiny1 has filled our minds with tangled formulas1 and has attached our affection to particular matters4 ,the pomp of preambles and the stress of language stun us4 ,there is so much of organized society4 ,there are so many good ends4 ,if there were only one man in the world1 we know that it would be impossible to do good to him by suggesting evil4 ,we know that if we gave him a hint that contained both good and evil1 the good would do him good1 and the evil1 evil4 ,if we were bent on nothing but benefit1 we should have to confine ourselves to suggestions of unalloyed virtue4 ,but the world is such a tangle of personalities1 that we do not hesitate to mix a little evil in the good we do1 hoping that the evil will not be operative4 ,we half believe that there may1 somewhere in the community1 be a hitch in the multiplication table that brings out good for evil4 ,liberty and democracy are thought to be such worthy ends1 that we must obtain them by any means and all means1 even by hiring mercenaries4 ,can we wonder that in the past1 men's minds were staggered by the importance of a papacy or of some dynastic succession8 ,to-day everybody jumps to shield vice because it is called republicanism or democracy4 ,the irony of history could go no further4 ,let us consider our local reforms by the light of these views4 ,civil service laws1 ballot-reform1 elections1 taxation1--dissolve all these into acts and impulses1 and see whether the laws of human influence do not make a short cut through them all1 like ,x-rays4 ,no matter what ,i talk about to the ,emperor1 ,i am really conveying to him by suggestion a tendency to become as good or as bad a man as ,i myself4 ,chinese ,gordon turned a dynamo of personal force upon the ,orientals1 and they understood him4 ,he was talking religion1 and he gave it to them straight4 ,now all religion1 as everybody knows1 is purely a matter of suggestion4 ,but so is all other intercourse4 ,we want honesty4 ,well1 what makes people honest8 ,honesty4 ,does anything else spread the influence of honesty1 except honesty8 ,are we here facing a scientific fact8 ,is this a law of the transference of human energy1 or is it not8 ,if it is1 you cannot beat it4 ,you cannot imagine any situation where your own total force1 in favor of honesty1 will consist of anything else than honesty4 ,of course you may put a case where honesty will result in somebody's death4 ,if in that case1 you want his life1 why1 lie4 ,but what you will get will be his life1 not the spread of honesty4 ,if the event is chronicled1 you will find it used as a means of justifying dishonesty forever afterwards4 ,we do not want any of these reforms except as a means of stimulating character1 and it is a law of nature that character can only be stimulated directly4 ,sincerity is the only need1 courage the all-sufficing virtue4 ,we can dump them into every occasion1 and sleep sound at night4 ,what interest can any rational man have in our municipal issues except as a grindstone on which to whet the people's moral sense8 ,how is it possible to deceive ourselves into looking at our own political activity from any other standpoint than this8 ,you are to make a speech at ,cooper ,union on ballot reform4 ,somebody says1 8,do not mention the liquor question or you will lose votes40 ,but some phase of that question seems to you pertinent and important4 ,shall you omit and submit8 ,that would be an odd way of stimulating character4 ,the need of the times is not ballot laws but sincerity4 ,the maximum that any man can do toward the spread of sincerity is to display it himself4 ,all the virtues spread themselves by direct propagation2 and the vices likewise4 ,our people are deficient in righteous indignation4 ,when you see a man righteously indignant1 rejoice2 this is the seed1 this the force4 ,nothing else will arouse courage but courage1 faith but faith4 ,you see1 for instance1 a knot of men who are really indignant at the injustice of the times4 ,but their indignation seems to you a danger2 because it is likely to defeat some candidate1 some pet measure of yours4 ,you wish to allay it4 ,you wish yourself well rid of this sacred indignation2 it is inconvenient4 ,open your eyes to the light of science4 ,here is a spark of that fire with which everybody ought to be filled4 ,all your scheming was only for the purpose of getting this fire4 ,then foment it4 ,virtue then1 is a mode of motion1 or it is an attitude of mind in a human organism1 which enables that organism to transmit virtue to others4 ,but vice is also a mere attitude of mind by which vice is transmitted4 ,we know less about the natural history of vice than we do of dipsomania and consumption2 but we know this much1 that the vices are co-related1 and breed one another in transitu2 the tendency being towards lighter forms in the later catchers4 ,avoid another's guilty side1 and you reinforce it2 sympathize with it1 and you catch his disease1 or some disease4 ,i have held hands with my friend 7who is in the wrong7 over his family troubles1 and it has given me the distemper for a week4 ,the ,german actor1 ,devrient1 went mad while studying the inmates of asylums1 as a preparation to playing ,king ,lear4 ,it was not the living in asylums that drove him mad1 but his sympathetic attitude toward the disease4 ,this exposed him4 ,why is it we commend the man whose antagonism to crooked work is so great that he shows a tempter the door before he has finished his proposition8 ,parleying is not only a danger2 it is the beginning of the trouble itself4 ,it is very difficult and very odious offending people1 by forcing them to see in which direction our wheels really go round2 and yet the alternative is to have our machinery forced back to a standstill4 ,we are interlocked with other people and cannot break free4 ,we are held in place by fate1 and played upon against our will4 ,when you see cruelty going on before you1 you are put to the alternative of interposing to stop it1 or of losing your sensibility4 ,there is a law of growth here involved4 ,it is inexorable4 ,you are at the mercy of it4 ,you wish yourself elsewhere1 but you are here2 you are a mere illustration of pitiless and undying force4 ,the part you take1 may run through a fit of bad temper or malice4 ,it may turn to covetousness or conceit1 who can tell8 ,some poison has entered your eye because you looked negligently upon corruption4 ,it will cost you some part of your sense of smell4 8,use or lose10 says ,nature when she gives us capacities4 ,what you condone1 you support2 what you neglect1 you confirm4 ,it is true that your confirmation and support are managed through the mechanism of blindness4 ,all the evil in the world receives its chief support from the people whose only connection with it is that they do not fight it1 nor see it4 ,where politics is involved scarcely a man in ,america knows the difference between right and wrong4 ,our mayoralty contest five years ago would have left ,lot searching for a man who could tell black from white4 ,it was a clear moral issue4 ,but it arose in politics3 we could not see it4 ,that we have intellectual cataract is entirely due to the habit of condoning embezzlement4 ,it is a secondary form of the endemic theft1 caught by the by-standers4 ,the best people in town had it4 ,if they had been lifting their hands against theft during the preceding years1 they never would have caught it4 ,of course we support all the good in the world1 as well as all the evil2 and the ratio in which we do both changes at every moment4 ,it radiates forth from us1 and is read correctly by every baby as he passes in his perambulator4 ,close thinking1 and fresh observation of things too familiar to be noticed1 bring us to this point4 ,now1 just as no complexity of institutions affects the transfer of virtue1 so none affects the transfer and propagation of vice4 ,yesterday you were all for virtue4 ,you were for leading a revolution against the bosses1 and were ready to work and subscribe and vote4 ,you were a man with the heart of a man4 ,but to-day you are chop-fallen4 8,the thing cannot be done4 ,it is not the year40 ,the degradation of your character is seen in your low spirits1 and in the jaded and sophistical commonplaces you pour forth4 ,i know the academical reasons for this change in you4 ,i can express it in terms of ballot-law and civil service4 ,but what is it that really has happened8 ,the power that has struck you was focalized the day before yesterday in the office of some law-broking politicians2 and the direct rays of base passion have struck straight through stone walls and constitutions1 and1 falling upon you1 have stopped your wheels4 ,in them it was avarice and ambition4 ,in you it is doubt4 ,a drowsy inertia overcomes you1 a blindness of the will4 ,that is what has really happened4 ,the rest is illusion and metaphysical talk4 ,see1 now1 the real curse of injustice2 it takes away the sight from the eyes1 and that in a night4 ,is it not perfectly natural that ,tammany ,hall should be everywhere1 at all tables1 in all churches1 in all consciences1 when these electrical currents run between man and man and connect them so easily8 ,i read in the newspaper that a well-known man is at ,albany in the interests of a gas deal4 ,he cannot get his way in the city1 and is putting up a job with the legislature4 ,i see the thing going through1--a thing utterly cynical1 utterly corrupt4 ,no paper will explain it because it cannot be explained without names2 besides1 the names own the papers4 ,everybody understands it2 nobody minds it4 ,is any statute here at fault8 ,will any legislation cure this8 ,if the moral sensibility of our people should become tensified by twenty per cent in twenty-four hours1 twenty per cent of all our iniquities in every department would cease in forty-eight hours4 ,government is carried on by the lightning of personal suggestion which flashes through the community from day to day and from moment to moment4 ,those things are done which are demanded or are tolerated at the instant they are done4 ,i read in a newspaper that a syndicate has been formed to light the city4 ,it is backed by the men who control the city administration1 and they are now blackmailing the existing company to its ruin4 ,can ,i escape the knowledge of this thing8 ,alas1 too easily3 ,i own stock in it4 ,at first we think the legislature makes the laws1 then we see it is done by a cabal1 then by people behind the cabal1 finally by the million bonds of popular prejudice which tie each man up with the times4 ,look closely1 take some particular man1 and consider why it is that he does not spend his whole time in fighting for virtue4 ,it will turn out1 that in some form or other1 he is a beneficiary of these evils1 and has not the energy to fight them4 ,one man depends upon the status quo for his living1 the next is held by affection for his friends1 by the ties of old prejudice1 by inertia1 by hopelessness4 ,which of them is the more deeply injured victim of tyranny1--the active self-seeker or the listless man1 the ,tammany boy or the ,american gentleman8 ,every man bears a direct and discoverable share in the responsibility4 ,a janitor keeps his place through ,tammany influence1 a young lawyer gets business by keeping his mouth shut4 ,follow out the lines leading from any man1 no matter how obscure he is1 and they will lead you to the ante-chamber where gigantic business has its offices1 where the highest functionaries of commerce and politics meet4 ,the business world is all one organization4 ,it is a sort of secret society1 a great web4 ,no matter where you touch it1 the same spiders come out4 ,the boss system1 then1 appears as the visible part of all the private selfishness in ,america4 ,it is a great religion of self-interest1 with its hierarchy1 its chapels1 its propaganda1 and its confessors in every home4 ,you yourself support it4 ,i saw last week1 at your table1 a magnate whose business conduct you deplore1 and to-day ,i heard a young man make the comment1 that there was no use fighting the current so long as social influence could be bought4 ,do not accuse ,tammany ,hall2 you yourself have corrupted that young man4 ,so long as you think you can circumvent the laws of force1 you will remain a pillar in the temple of iniquity4 ,but look closer still at each of those individuals1 and see just what it is he is giving as the purchase money4 ,one man gives #be1jjj to pay a president's private debts1 and goes as minister to ,england2 another gives merely his name to indorse a doubtful candidate for the assembly1 and receives prospective good will from the organization4 ,what is this great market overt where every one can get what he wants8 ,the syndicate can get the franchises1 and the aldermen the cash4 ,no one is too small to be served1 or so great as to require nothing4 ,upon what principle is this monstrous bazaar1 this clearing-house for self-interest1 conducted8 ,it is as large as the ,united ,states--the transcontinental railroads use it--and so well managed that ,i can get my friend a job as the secretary of a reform movement4 ,what is it that makes this universal shop run so smoothly8 ,it is hooked together simply on business principles4 ,the price you pay is always the rubbing of somebody the right way2 the thing you get is advancement or personal comfort of some sort4 ,it has happened1 that by the operation of commercial forces1 the whole of ,america's seventy million people have been polarized into self-seekers2 and our total condition is visibly ,vanity ,fair4 ,you can actually follow the rays of power from the individual to the boss4 ,all the evil in the world is seen to be in league4 ,embezzlement and laziness1 selfish ambition and prejudice1 cruelty and timidity here openly play into each other's hands1 support and console each other4 ,nay1 every atom of vice1 every impulse of malice or cupidity1 can be shown up as a tendon or a sinew of the great organization of selfish forces4 ,it is as if a magic glass had been superposed upon the continent1 and1 looking down through it1 upon the motives of men1 all complexity vanished1 and we saw all the evil forces pulling one way4 ,the same thing has always been true in every society2 but the names1 powers1 superstitions have been so extremely complicated that no one could follow the laws of interlocking motive1 except by inference and prophetic insight4 ,take the case of a very selfish man fighting his way up through society in the reign of ,louis ,,xviii4 ,he meets a ,bourbon influence1 an ecclesiastical influence1 a ,napoleonic influence1 a republican influence4 ,he grapples with every man he meets1 using the hooks of self-interest in that man4 ,the forces at work under ,louis ,,xviii4 were as simple as with us4 ,only the nomenclature is different1 and more complex4 ,it is easy in ,america to see the working of one man's selfishness upon another's4 ,let alone the market overt1 it is easy to trace the subtle social relations1 when they are for the bad4 ,it was easy to follow the effect of your conduct in asking the dishonest business magnate to dinner1 because the young man spoke of it4 ,he was shocked and injured4 ,but we also found out by the episode that before you did the thing1 you were really a factor for good in his life1 holding up his conscience and his ideals4 ,the inexpressible subtlety in the mechanism of man makes the transmission of the force for good as easy as that of the force for evil4 ,they are of the same character1 and very often flow through the same channels4 ,there is no more mystery in the one case than in the other4 ,consider what is done in the course of any practical movement for reform4 ,a bad bill is pending at ,albany4 ,in order to beat it1 a party of men whose characters are trusted1 get on a train1 and the whole ,state watches them proceed to ,albany4 ,this is often enough to defeat a measure4 ,the good their pilgrimage does1 is done then and there instantly1 by example1 by suggestion4 ,if1 when they get to ,albany1 they sell out their cause1 the harm they do is done then and there by example1 by suggestion4 ,they make some concession which lessens friction but suggests ,tammany ,hall4 ,this is the only part of the transaction that reaches the great public4 ,ask the laboring man and he will give you a digest of the whole episode in a shrug4 ,if a reform candidate is running on the platform 8,thou shalt not steal10 and the boss desires to corrupt him1 the boss asks him to drop in for a chat4 ,if he goes1 every one hears of it the next day1 and every one is a little corrupted himself4 ,a thousand well-meaning men say he did right4 ,had he resisted1 these same men would have cried 8,bravo60 and thereafter taken a higher view of human nature4 ,it is by a succession of such minute shocks of good or bad example that communities are affected4 ,the truth seems to be that our lives are ruled by laws of influence which are in themselves exceedingly direct4 ,but the operation of them is concealed from us by our preoccupation over details4 ,it is impossible to regard these matters in too simple a light4 ,nothing is ever involved except the contagious impulse that makes one man yawn when he sees another man yawn4 ,both the good and the evil in the world run upon the winds4 ,moses' habit of falling upon his face before the congregation1 and calling ,god to witness that he could lead them no longer1 was not a political trick done to frighten the people into submission by the threat of abandoning them4 ,it was a sincere act of devotion2 but it was also the most powerful form of appeal4 ,he did the act2 they followed in it1 and thus made him absolute4 ,lincoln's anecdotes and fables consisted of nothing but suggestion4 ,they were one source of his power4 ,the first thing a tyrant does is to suppress cartoons4 ,here we have something that is often sheer pantomime1 and yet it is one of the most effective vehicles in the world4 ,it was the only thing ,platt could not stand4 ,within two years he has tried to stop it by legislation4 ,if you are to reach masses of people in this world1 you must do it by a sign language4 ,whether your vehicle be commerce1 literature1 or politics1 you can do nothing but raise signals1 and make motions to the people4 ,in literature this is obvious4 ,the more far-reaching any truth is1 the shorter grow its hieroglyphics4 ,the great truths can only be given in hints1 phrases1 and parables4 ,they lie in universal experience1 and any comment belittles them4 ,they are like the magnetic poles that can only be pointed out with a needle4 ,take any profound saying about life1 and see if it does not imply short-hand1 a sort of telegraphy as the ordinary means of communication between men4 8,he that loseth his life shall save it40 ,here we have a poem1 a system of ethics and a psychology4 ,or take any bit of worldly wisdom1 8,money talks40 ,here we have the whole philosophy of materialism4 ,does any one imagine that political bargains are reduced to writing8 ,it would be injurious to the conscience4 ,they are made by the merest hints on all sides4 ,every one is left free4 ,the extreme case of the power of suggestion is seen in the stock-market1 where a rumor that ,banker ,a has dined with ,railroad ,president ,b drives values up or down4 ,cleveland's ,venezuela message makes a panic4 ,the different parts of the financial world live1 from day to day1 in instantaneous and throbbing communication4 ,this is one side of the popular life4 ,its thermometer is sensitive1 and records one thousandth of a degree as readily as the political thermometer records a single degree4 ,but the principle is the same4 ,all the people run the stock-market1 and all the people run politics4 ,there has never been any difficulty in reaching the whole people with ideas4 ,even a private man can do it4 ,but he must act them out4 ,,vi ,,principles 7continued74 ,suppose a small child steals jam in the pantry4 ,so long as he pretends that he did not do it1 or did not know it was wrong1 he suffers a certain oppression4 ,you can explain to an intelligent child that if he tells the whole truth about the thing1 the telling will cost him pain and leave him happy4 ,but you cannot save him the pain4 ,so long as he persists in lying1 some of his faculties lie under an inhibition2 the vital energies flow past them instead of through them4 ,the first shock of a through passage gives a spasm of pain1 and then the child is happy4 ,it is one of the facts of the world that moral awakening is accompanied by pain4 ,the quarrel that the world has with its agitators is that they do really agitate4 ,people express this by saying that the men are dangerous or have bad taste4 ,the epithets vary with the age4 ,they are intended to excite public contempt1 and they embody the aversions of society4 ,in a martial age the reformer is called a molly-coddle2 in a commercial age an incompetent1 a disturber of values2 in a fanatical age1 a heretic4 ,if an agitator is not reviled1 he is a quack4 ,these epithets are mere figures of speech4 ,what they really express is suffering caused by the workings of conscience4 ,and so in any educational movement that runs across the country1 there is always a track of pain turning to happiness4 ,when we get in the path of one of these things1 we find that the division between contending ideas passes through the individual man4 ,it does not fall between men4 ,the struggle is always the struggle of forces within an individual4 ,a is trying to convince ,b4 ,the struggle in ,a's mind is to make the matter clear1 in ,b's mind to make the opposite clear4 ,in the course of time one view prevails2 but the struggle continues1 for ,b occupies ,a's position and is now struggling to convince ,c4 ,it is in this way that a movement runs through a community4 ,the firing line passes through a series of individuals1 and as they succumb1 through them to the next4 ,if you take any particular case of conflict1 you will find that the man is divided between two courses1 one of which is disagreeable because it involves effort and sacrifice and offence4 ,the other is agreeable because it involves personal ease or personal advancement4 ,the two motives in man result from the structure of his brain1 whose operations we are obliged to accept3 we cannot amend them2 they are the facts of psychology4 ,it would seem as if the brain of man were so constituted that at the moment of its full operation the man himself disappears4 ,his consciousness becomes wholly occupied with impersonal interests4 ,thus1 in the process of thought1 a man begins to see his own personal interests threatened4 ,if he continues to think1 they must vanish4 ,this is the struggle between right and wrong4 ,it is really a struggle between two attitudes of mind4 ,it is the experience we suffer when the mind is passing from the self-regardant to the non-self-regardant attitude4 ,perhaps the discomfort of doing one's duty is an inseparable incident of the storage of energy1 and the pleasure of neglecting one's duty1 an incident of the leakage of energy4 ,when ,i get up and poke the fire1 because ,i see it will go out if ,i don't1 ,i return to my chair a more energetic being than ,i was the moment before4 ,at any rate1 our oscillation between two states of consciousness has preoccupied mankind from the earliest times1 and has given rise to all the dualistic philosophies4 ,the great fact as to the reality of the struggle is proved to us1 not merely by our own consciousness1 but because we can see the logical results of it everywhere in society4 ,a community is a collection of palpitating animals4 ,each of us is one of them1 and each of us receives and transmits millions of impressions hourly4 ,we get heard4 ,we have our exact weight and force4 ,there is no difficulty about our power of intercourse4 ,indeed it is the thing we cannot get away from4 ,no man walks by himself4 ,between his feet and the ground are invisible pedals that play upon1 and are played upon by other men4 ,you cannot live or move except by transmitting influence4 ,the whole of practical life is made up of contact with the passions of others4 ,a lawyer or a broker is like an engineer who sits behind his machine1 managing its levers and its stopcocks4 ,a trader1 a writer1 or a philanthropist1 a laborer or a clergyman1 does nothing but open and shut valves in other people4 ,there is no other way of serving your fellows2 there is no other way of earning your living or of wasting your substance4 ,we saw that in politics it was impossible to draw a dividing line anywhere in that series of men whose joint activity and inactivity held up what we call the evils of politics4 ,money interest shaded off into prejudice1 and that into mistaken loyalty1 and that into indifference4 ,the striking truth about the whole series was that it showed different shades of selfishness1 lack of energy1 and inability to use the mind accurately4 ,so also any unselfish or accurate use of his mind by the laborer or by the journalist was1 as we saw1 apt to throw him out of employment4 ,in politics and in morals1 all that we condemn1 turns out on inspection to be mere selfishness4 ,but anything in the world that we dislike1 turns out1 on inspection1 to be self-regardant effort or avoidance of effort4 ,bad art may show the gross selfishness of the pot-boiler1 or the refined laziness of prejudice1 or the mere weakness that was unable to see the world for itself1 and has been forced to see it with some one else's eyes4 ,it is a makeshift4 ,so of bad carpentry or bad cooking4 ,there is no such special province in life as morality4 ,each man regards that thing as immoral which he sees to be selfish4 ,a proofreader will show the same indignation over a careless job1 that a musician shows over a weak phrasing4 ,the unimaginable subtlety of our comprehension enables us to detect selfishness in arts of whose methods we know nothing2 we read it like large print4 ,to speak accurately1 all we get from any communication is a transcript1 an image1 a picture of the author's thought1 the jar of intellect and character4 ,is it supposed that communication between men goes forward by ratiocination1 or that education is a thing taken in by linear measurement8 ,thought cannot creep1 but only fly4 ,it proceeds by the magic of stimulation4 ,a good judge can read a good brief almost as fast as he can turn the pages4 ,if a thing is well put1 it is almost our own before it is said4 ,ideas pass into us so quickly that ,plato thought we knew them in a former existence4 ,this is due to the subtlety of our apprehension4 ,we are not satisfied except by an appeal so refined that our only sensation is one of being made more alive4 8,rien ne me choque0 was ,chopin's highest praise4 ,what wonder1 then1 that we resent the self-sufficiency of any inferior mind8 ,the whole of life is no more than a series of pulsations1 and all the books and ,bibles1 sign-boards1 music-boxes1 and telegraph wires are the machinery by which in one way or another the mind of man touches the mind of man4 ,the world has been going on for so long that we have many such devices1 and out of the millions that have been made1 all but the very best get discarded as old lumber4 ,these things are the language of the unselfish force upon the globe4 ,it is much nearer truth to think of them as a single influence than as multifarious4 ,their origin and tendency1 their practical utility1 the veneration in which they are held1 bind them together and make them one4 ,for the world values the seer above all men1 and has always done so4 ,nay1 it values all men in proportion as they partake of the character of seers4 ,the ,elgin ,marbles and a decision of ,john ,marshall are valued for the same reason4 ,what we feel in them is a painstaking submission to facts beyond the author's control1 and to ideas imposed upon him by his vision4 ,so with ,beethoven's ,symphonies1 with ,adam ,smith's 8,wealth of ,nations10--with any conceivable output of the human mind of which you approve4 ,you love them because you say1 8,these things were not made1 they were seen40 ,thus the forces of an unselfish sort upon the globe are cumulative4 ,the dead heroes fight on forever1 and the dead mathematicians expound forever4 ,it is true that the organization of the selfish forces is overwhelmingly visible1 and that of the unselfish ones invisible4 ,napoleon is seen by his contemporaries2 ,spinoza is not seen4 ,the reason is simple4 ,the man who wants something must have an office address4 ,but the man who wants nothing for himself1 but spends his whole time in so using his mind that he himself disappears1 lives only as an influence in the minds of others4 ,he is a song1 a theory1 a proposition in algebra4 ,these two conflicting forms of force are then flashed up and down1 forward and back ceaselessly1 through and across every social meeting1 through and across society4 ,the novelists and playwrights deal with this instantaneous interplay of motive2 and the time-honored analysis of self for self on the villain's side1 and sacrifice for principle on the hero's side is a true thing4 ,it is a fair abstract of the world4 ,you can illustrate in an instant the immediacy of these two hierarchies of power under which we live and from which we cannot escape4 ,the selfish ones need not be named2 they oppress us4 ,but the unselfish ones are equally near4 ,if you take any bit of poetry or speech or writing that you consider great1 and examine it1 you will find that it illustrates the logical coherence of all the ideas and feelings that make you happy2 it is a digest of a law of influence4 ,or conversely1 if you set about to illustrate some experience1 and if you can get it profoundly and accurately stated as what you believe to be the bottom truth1 it will turn under your hands into something familiar4 ,if you are successful1 it will be a kind of poetry4 ,,vii ,,conclusion ,there is force enough in ordinary sunshine to turn all the mills in the world2 and there is beneficent energy enough in any community to make the people perfectly happy4 ,but it is cramped and deflected1 poisoned by misuse1 and turned to hateful ends4 ,the question is how to liberate energy4 ,people are fond of thinking the millennium is impossible2 but so long as happiness is dependent on a right use of the faculties1 there is no reason why the millennium should not be reached1 and that soon or unexpectedly4 ,we all know individuals so harmoniously framed that we say1 8,if theirs were the common temper of mankind1 we should be happy40 ,none of the externals of life1 about which there is so much buffeting1 control the question4 ,happiness is in a nutshell4 ,anybody can have it4 ,you are happy if you get out of bed on the right side4 ,i can never stop wondering at the awful simplicity of the principle on which mankind is constructed4 ,little ,alice in the ,looking-,glass could not reach the porch till she turned her back on it and walked straight into the door4 ,renounce the search for happiness and you find the substance4 ,there is nothing else in the law and the prophets4 ,we see most men like tee-totums spinning to the left and leading a dismal life4 ,how shall we get their motive power to spin them to the right1 and make them happy8 ,the practical question is3 how to use the power of sunlight to turn our mills4 ,how can we hold up a prism to the times that shall disintegrate these rays of complex force1 and then adjust a lens that shall focus the powers of good and make them turn the wheels of society8 ,the elements are before us1 ceaselessly in motion4 4 ,the most adamantine institutions are cloud palaces4 ,there is no stability anywhere2 and if you have a steady eye you will see that the whole fabric is in a flux4 ,nor are the changes arbitrary4 ,the formations and re-formations are governed by laws as certain as those of astronomy4 ,study the changes and you will find the laws4 ,subserve the laws and you can affect the formations4 ,julius ,csar did no more4 ,the strands of prejudice and passion that bind people together pulsate with life4 ,all these fellow-citizens are human beings1 and there is no one of them whom we cannot understand1 reach1 influence4 ,the ordinary modes of intercourse are at hand4 ,chief among them you find the great machinery of government4 ,it dwarfs every other agency1 whether for good or ill4 ,in ,america this machinery was designed to be at the service of anybody4 ,it is an advertising agency for ideas1 and it is very much more than this2 since the fact that a man is to vote forces him to think4 ,you may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action4 ,but throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge4 ,you can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it4 ,and on the other hand1 no amount of verbal proof will justify a new thought until it has been put in practice4 ,alas for ink and paper6 ,there is in all speech and writing a conventional presumption that human beings shall be logical1 or fixed quantities1 or at least coherent creatures4 ,for the purposes of an essay or a speech1 you prove your case1 and carry weight accordingly4 ,if you are very cogent and conclusive1 why1 you win4 ,hurrah6 the world is saved4 ,but in real life there are no fixed quantities2 all the terms are variables4 ,for example1 everybody understands what is meant by the 8,moral ,law40 ,people differ only as to the application of that law4 ,not long ago ,i heard a sermon on this law1 in which great stress was laid on the fact that it was a discovered law whereby the truth prevailed4 ,any truce with evil meant defeat for the cause of righteousness4 ,this was the law of ,god1 tested by experience1 and in constant operation like the law of gravity1 a thing you could not escape4 ,the preacher pictured the solitary struggle of the great man seeking truth1 his proclamation of the truth1 the refusal of the world to receive it1 and the prophet's isolation and apparent failure4 ,nevertheless what the prophet said had always the same content4 ,it was an appeal to the instincts of man upon the question of right and wrong1 and in the end it was accepted4 ,now the man who made this exposition1 and it was admirable1 is in regard to politics a believer in compromise4 ,i think ,i have never known him support the idealist cause in a campaign2 and upon most occasions of crisis he is found heartily throwing stones at the crusaders4 ,what words in any language can make this man understand that his law--which he really does profoundly understand as a law--applies to reform movements8 ,why1 no words will do it1 only example4 ,new statements about morality1 however eloquent1 add nothing to our knowledge4 ,everything is known about the moral law1 except how you yourself will act under given circumstances4 ,you have nothing but example to contribute4 ,people interrogate force4 ,they are unconvinced1 and are carried1 still protesting1 through the air and deposited in a new place4 ,and then1 thereafter1 they agree with you about the whole matter4 ,mere intellectual assent to your proposition is1 even when you can get it1 worth nothing4 ,your object is not to confute1 but to stimulate4 ,what you really want is that every man you meet shall drop his business and devote his entire life and energy to your cause4 ,you will accept nothing less than this4 ,is it not clear that people are not moved by logic8 ,your conduct must ultimately square with reason and be justified by the laws of the universe and the constitution of other people's minds2 but you must value only that approval which comes from the deeper fibres in men4 ,you need not be concerned about the bickerings of contemporary misunderstanding4 ,leave these for the historical society4 ,act first--explain afterwards4 ,that is the way to get heard4 ,must you show your passport and certificate of birth and legitimacy to every editor and every lackey8 ,they'll find out who you are by and by4 ,it is easier to knock a man down than to say why you do it4 ,the act is sometimes needed1 and wisdom then approves it after the event4 ,people who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this1--that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog4 ,philosophy will not do it4 ,such are the practical dictates of agitation4 ,their justification lies always with events4 ,it may be that you must wait seven centuries for an audience1 or it may be that in two years your voice will be heeded4 ,if you are really a forerunner of better times1 the times will appear and explain you4 ,it will then turn out that your movement was the keynote of the national life4 ,you really differed from your neighbors only in this1--that your mind had gone faster than theirs along the road all were travelling4 ,we are all slaves of the age2 we can only see such principles as society reveals4 ,the philosophy of other ages does us little good4 ,we repeat the old formulas and cry up the prophets2 but we see no connection between the truth we know so well in print and its counterpart in real life4 ,the moral commonplaces1 as1 for instance1 8,honesty is the best policy10 8,a single just man can influence an entire community10 8,never compromise a principle10 are social truths4 ,they are always true1 but they are only obviously true in very virtuous communities4 ,in a vile community the influence of a just man is potent but not visible4 ,in a perfectly virtuous era it is clear that a cheat could not drive a fraudulent trade4 ,a seer is a man with such sharp eyes for cause and effect that he sees social truth1 even under unfavorable conditions4 ,and yet even the seers generally had auspicious weather1--that is to say1 storms of moral passion4 ,the whole race of ,jews lived in fervent exaltation for generations1 and revealed to their sharp-sighted prophets deep glimpses of social truth4 ,hence the ,bible4 8,a prophet is not without honor save in his own country40 ,what happy precision6 ,what sound generalization6 ,but every township in ,israel had its prophet1 and the truth was a commonplace4 ,all the world's moral wisdom would turn into literal truth upon the regeneration of society4 ,it tends to become obvious in regenerative eras4 ,in dark ages it becomes paradox4 ,standards are multiplied1 and makeshift theories come in1--one rule for social conduct1 another for business1 another for politics4 ,expedient supplants principle4 ,indeed you may gauge the degradation of an age by the multiplicity of its standards4 ,it is the same with the fine arts4 ,to the men that made the statues and the pictures1 these things were the shortest symbols of truth1 and required no explanation4 ,in the dark ages that followed they became a mystery and a paradox4 ,but the traditions and objects survived and had to be accounted for4 ,an age that cannot produce them requires a philosophy of sthetics4 ,thus a thousand reasons are given to explain their existence1 and finally it is agreed that they are something superfluous and fictitious1--conventional lies1 like poetry1 like loving your neighbor4 ,nothing but a general increase of interest in the aspect of common things would explain to us the great masters4 ,a revival of interest in the way the world looks is the precursor of painting3 the perceptions of every one are quickening4 ,and so we may be sure that we are upon the edge of a better era when the old moral commonplaces begin to glow like jewels and the stones to testify4 ,you cannot expect any one but a scientist to be startled at the movement of a glacier4 ,but if you distribute a few micrometric instruments upon that gloomy ice-field1 the ,american civic consciousness1 and if you take observations not oftener than once in three years1 you will be startled4 ,the direction of the general movement is absolutely right4 ,but it all moves together4 ,special signs of progress imply general progress1 and hence comes the extraordinary and scientific interest in the awakening of this community4 ,it is like a man lapsed into the deepest coma who is beginning to stir4 ,watch him1 take his pulse1 surround him with every apparatus of experimental physiology1 and you will find the laws of health1 the norm of progress4 ,art and literature1 and that moral atmosphere which makes a society worth moving in1 lie on the other side of the great reaction1 the spiritual revival which we see now faintly beginning2 and it is because these things can be got at only by stimulating ,american character that these reform movements are of value4 ,here at least the circulation throbs4 ,political reform--that is to say1 a political life in which men who are personally honest predominate1 a politics run by ideas--will come in as fast as the public develops ideas1 and not before4 ,but an idea is something very different from what you who read this think it is4 ,an idea is a thing that governs your conduct all the time4 ,for instance1 you assent to the notion of independence in politics2 you understand the lost-cause theory1 but you won't vote the ticket4 ,why8 ,you don't want to get out of your class4 ,the relations between thought and action in you are not normal4 ,half of your brain has never functioned1 and the paralysis shows in your politics4 ,you have no idea4 ,it is not this sort of idea that expels rascals or makes books or music4 ,what passes for political thought in your vocabulary is like the phantasma in the brain of the ,indian priest who is buried with the corn growing above him4 ,the average educated man in ,america has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint4 ,each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate somehow4 ,show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all4 ,it must be corrupt or he will not recognize it4 ,he has only seen dried figs4 ,he has only thought dried thoughts4 ,a live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind4 ,imagine a tea-party of pre-,raphaelites discussing ,dante2 they dote on his style1 his passion1 his force1 his quality4 ,in walks ,dante1 grim1 remorseless1 harsh1 powerful4 ,the man represents everything they hate4 ,he is a horror and an outrage4 ,the whole region of literature that these men live in is not more fictitious than the region of political thought in which the effete ,american--,i mean your banker1 your college president1 your writer of editorial leaders--lives4 ,exclude for the moment those who are financially corrupt and consider only the men of intellect1 and in all that concerns politics they are as removed from real ideas as ,rossetti was removed from the real ,dante4 ,imagine a company of people on a voyage4 ,they play whist with one another for dimes1 and they spend all their money on the steward and continue to play with counters1 and the ship goes to wreck1 and they sit on the beach and continue to play with pebbles4 ,that is ,american politics4 ,the whole thing is one gigantic sham1 one transcendent fraud4 ,it makes no difference which man is made president2 it makes no difference which is governor4 ,there is no choice between ,mc,kinley and ,bryan1 between ,republicanism and ,democracy4 ,there is no difference between them4 ,they are one thing4 ,they both and all of them are part of the machinery by which the government of a most dishonest nation is carried on1 for the financial benefit of certain parties1--certain thousands of men who have bank accounts and eat and drink and bring up their families on the proceeds of this complicated swindle4 ,there is no reality in a single phrase uttered in politics1 no meaning in one single word of any of it4 ,there is no man in public life who stands for anything4 ,they are shadows2 they are phantasmagoria4 ,at best they cater to the better elements2 at worst they frankly subserve the worst4 ,there is no one who stands for his own ideas himself1 by himself1 a man4 ,if ,american politics does not look to you like a joke1 a tragic dance2 if you have enough blindness left in you1 on any plea1 on any excuse1 to vote for the ,democratic party or the ,republican party 7for at present machine and party are one71 or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era1--then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern2 you are an exhibit1 a quaint product1 a curiosity of the ,american soil4 ,you are part of the problem1 and you must be educated and drawn forward towards real life4 ,this process is going on4 ,as the community returns to life1 it sees the natural world for a moment and then forgets it4 ,the blood flushes the brain and then recedes4 ,you yourself voted once against both parties1 when you thought you could win1 and when you were excited4 ,you quoted ,isaiah and ,i know not what poetry1 and were out and out committed to principle2 but to-day you are cold and hopeless4 ,at present1 hope is a mystery to you4 ,nevertheless the utility of those early reform movements survives4 ,they heated the imagination of the people till the people had a momentary vision of truths which not all of them forgot2 and so each year the temperature has been higher1 the mind of the community clearer4 ,we must not regard those broken reeds1 the renegade leaders of reform movements1 as villains2 though the mere record of their words and conduct might prove them such4 ,they have been men emerging from a mist4 ,they see clearly for a moment1 and then clouds sweep before them4 ,vanity1 selfishness1 ambition1 tradition1 habit1 intervene like a fog4 ,they have been betrayed1 too1 by the fickle public1 that would not stand by them when in trouble4 ,in the recapture of any institution by the forces of honesty there are trenches that get filled by slaughtered honor4 ,this whole revolution means the invasion of politics by new men4 ,at first they are tyros1 unstable1 untried1 well-meaning fellows4 ,half of them crack in the baking4 ,but there are more coming1 and the fibre is growing tougher and the eyes clearer2 soon we shall have men4 ,a great passion is soon to replace the feeble conscientious motive that has hitherto brought the new men forward3 ambition1--the ambition to stand for ideas1 for ideas only1 and to get heard4 ,we have almost forgotten that public life is the natural ambition of every young man4 ,conditions have made it contemptible4 ,but these struggles signify that a change in those conditions has already begun4 ,your work and mine may be summed up in one word4 ,make it possible for a young man to go into public life untarnished1 and as an enemy to every extant evil4 ,you must have men who will not go except on these terms4 ,the times herald such men4 ,they will appear4 ,we must prepare for them4 99 99 99 99 99 ,the reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact4 ,every man is born under the yoke1 and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age4 ,he can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them1 and every appeal is a call to arms4 ,if he fights he must fight1 not one man1 but a conspiracy4 ,he is always at war with a civilization4 ,on his side is proverbial philosophy1 a galaxy of invisible saints and sages1 and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody4 ,against him is the world1 and every selfish passion in his own heart4 ,the instant he declares war1 every inducement is offered to make him stop4 8,toil1 envy1 want1 the patron1 and the jail0 intervene4 ,the instant he stops fighting he is allied with the enemy3 he is bought up by prejudice or by fatigue4 ,he begins to realize the importance of particular visible institutions1 as if their sole value did not come from the fraction of unselfishness they represent4 ,he rushes headlong into trade1 and thenceforth can see his country only as a series of trade interests4 ,he gets into some church and begins to value its organization1 or into some party and begins to value its past1 or into some club and begins to value his friends' feelings4 ,the consequence is that you may search ,christendom and hardly find a man who is free4 ,the advance of the world1 like the improvement of our local politics1 has always been the work of young men4 ,it is done by men before their minds have been worn into ruts by particular businesses1 or their sight shortened by the study of near things4 ,what we love in the young is not their youth1 but their force4 ,the energy that runs through them makes them sensitive4 ,they feel the importance of remote things1 and infer the relations of the present to the future more truly than their elders4 ,they are touched by hints4 ,the direct language of humanity is plain and native to them4 ,the invisible waves of force which do as a matter of fact rule the world1 using its fictions and its phrases as mere transmitting-plates1 strike keenly upon the heart of the youth1 and the vibrations of instinctive passion that shake his frame are the response of a strong creature to the laws of its universe4 ,this unlearned knowledge of good and evil is like the response of the eyes to light or of the tongue to the taste of a fruit4 ,it was not indoctrinated2 it is a reaction to a stimulus4 ,so long as the world shall last1 men will be writing books in order to explain and justify the instincts2 inventing theologies and ethical codes1 and projecting political programs to advance and confirm them4 ,if you take up some particular matter and begin to trace out its consequences upon mankind1 you find yourself forced boldly to embrace the sum of all human destiny4 ,we cannot follow out this course in detail4 ,we see only tendency2 we see only influence4 ,enlarge our horizon as we will1 we cannot live out the lives of all future generations1 and thus furnish an answer to the first caviller who interrupts our argument with a 8cui bono40 ,the generous impulses of youth represent a vision of consequences4 ,they take in more of the future at one glance than a philosopher can state in a year4 ,certainly1 so far as we can follow out the threads of influence1 the lines seem to converge4 ,they make a figure and point to a conclusion exactly upon that spot in the firmament where instinct would place it4 ,if philosophy gives us a diagram1 the rest of life fills it up1 and embellishes it with infinite illustration4 ,the proofs multiply1 and are hurled in upon us from all quarters of life and all provinces of endeavor4 ,the anecdotes and fables of the world1 its drama1 its poetry and fiction1 its religion and piety1 its domestic teaching and its monuments support this instinct1 and describe the same figure4 ,further still1 there is not a man who does not reveal it in his soul's anatomy3 so much so that upon every occasion except where his interests are touched1 he is for virtue1 and even where they are touched1 it is only a question of a few degrees more heat to dissolve the habits and prejudices of a lifetime1 and make him take off his coat and go into a war or a political campaign4 ,a single man1 as we see him in one of the great modern civilizations1 looks like a bit of machinery1 a cog or a crank or an air-brake4 ,the business man is especially mechanical1 his functions are so accurate1 so delimited and specialized4 ,and yet any theory that dwells upon these limitations is put to shame in five minutes1 for the creature eats and sheds tears before your eyes4 ,all of the reasons for not doing some particular act that you think wise to be done1 turn out to be founded on the idea that this man is a driving-wheel1 and nothing but a driving-wheel4 ,you cannot change him1 they say1 you must take him as he is4 ,i have never heard any argument given against the wisdom of righteousness1 except the existence of evil4 8,it exists1 therefore subserve it40 ,is it not clear that evil exists only because people subserve it8 ,it has no fixity4 ,withdraw your support and it begins to perish4 ,one man says1 8,oh1 let the world go4 ,all the wickedness and unhappiness in it are inevitable40 ,another says1 8,some little concession to present conditions must be made40 ,nothing can be said to justify the second man that is not moral support to the first4 ,your concession is always the acknowledgment of somebody's weakness4 ,now you may make allowances for a man who has not come up to the mark2 but if you make allowances for him beforehand1 and assume that he is not going to do right1 you corrupt him4 ,if these things are true1 then we are absolved from all complicity with vice4 ,we need never take a course that requires to be explained4 ,we thus get rid of a great oppression and can breathe freely4 ,in the language of the old piety1 ,christian's pack falls from his back4 ,that pack has1 in all ages1 been a perversion of the conscience1 a mistake as to the size of the universe4 ,we have seen all these ranks and armies of humanity pass in review before us1 each man with his eyes fixed in mesmeric intensity upon some set of opinions1 until he grew to be the thing he looked on4 ,these opinions of his are all we know of him4 ,they are not our own opinions4 ,they often appear to us misguided and illusory2 yet there is always to be found in them the light of some benevolence4 ,they are like broken mirrors and give back fractions of a larger idea4 ,the hope and courage in each of these men bless and advance the world2 but not in the way that the men themselves expect4 ,they seem all to be bent over a game of chess1 where every move has its real significance upon another board which they do not see4 ,each man seems to be following some will-o'-the-wisp across a landscape at night4 ,no cannon can waken these insensate sleepers4 ,and yet they are tracing out patterns and geometrical diagrams upon the sward2 they are weaving a magical dance that1 for all its intricacy1 has a planetary rhythm1 and the sober motion of a pendulum4 ,each individual in this unthinkable host gives an instance of the same fatality2 first1 that he becomes the thing he looks on1 and second1 that he accomplishes something that he does not understand4 ,and both parts of this fatality must hold true of ourselves4 ,certainly1 our subjection to the thing we look on is almost pitiable4 ,we cannot even remember a righteous hatred without beginning to take color from the thing we hate4 ,our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness2 our wickedness from thinking on wickedness4 ,we too are the victims of our own contemplation4 ,as for the last half of that fatality1 that keeps us forever ignorant of the true meaning of our lives1 it is not an absolute ignorance1 like our ignorance of how we came to exist4 ,it is a qualified ignorance1 like our ignorance that we have hurt some one's feelings4 ,the elements of understanding are within us3 to-morrow the whole matter may become clear4 ,the borders of our understanding extend1 as we push outward our frontier of inquiry4 ,this is both a frontier of scepticism1 and of faith4 ,it is a bulwark of doubt as to the value of our last new formula1 and of faith as to the reality behind that formula4 ,as we go forward1 bringing our lives down to date1 holding our experience at arm's length and examining it with a merciless endeavor to wring the truth out of it1 we do1 from day to day1 get a clearer notion of the actual world1 a truer idea of our own place in it4 ,this qualified and modest understanding of life1 that comes from putting things together that seem to go together1 is within the power of any one4 ,and we find this3 the more unselfish men become1 the more sensitive do they become in understanding human relations4 ,the gambler cannot see that he is giving pain to his family2 his self-indulgence has blunted his sensibilities4 ,the faith healer knows that he is curing a man in a neighboring ,state2 his love for mankind has refined his sensibilities4 ,most of us stand somewhere between these two extremes in the scale of understanding1 and are moving towards one or the other4 ,education1 then1 is the process by which we gradually discover both the real nature of the human life about us1 and our own relation to the whole of it4 ,the process is never complete4 ,even poets and great men are in the dark about their own function2 but they are less in the dark than the rest of us4 ,they speak from a knowledge that is greater than ours4 ,they have a wonderful power over us2 for they help us in our struggle to see the world as it is4 ,,other ,,books ,,by ,,john ,,jay ,,chapman ,,emerson ,,and ,,other ,,essays #abmo4 #a4be4 ,emerson4 ,walt ,whitman4 ,a ,study of ,romeo4 ,michael ,angelo's ,sonnets4 ,robert ,browning4 ,r4 ,l4 ,stevenson4 ,the ,fourth ,canto of the ,inferno4 ,mr4 ,chapman brings to bear on his task a rare store of critical perception and literary knowledge1 while in his own style there is nothing to be found of the obscure or the inflated4 ,the interesting part of ,mr4 ,chapman's work is that he has something new to say about everything he touches4--,the ,spectator4 ,this ,essay 7,emerson7 is the most effective critical attempt made in the ,united ,states1 or ,i should suppose anywhere1 to get near the sage of ,concord4--,,henry ,,james4 ,we shall hope to come across ,mr4 ,chapman again4 ,few living critics go so straight to the heart of their problem1 or waste so little time in writing 8about it and about40--,the ,academy4 ,,causes ,,and ,,consequences #abmo4 #a4be4 ,politics4 ,society4 ,education4 ,democracy4 ,government4 ,no one can read ,mr4 ,chapman's book without finding in it something instructive and suggestive4 ,the author is an enthusiast for humanity converted by stress of circumstances into a preacher against corruption4 ,his book is a manly appeal to the rising generation1 for whom it has a message of courage and hope sadly wanting nowadays4--,the ,nation4 ,this is a brilliant little book4 ,mr4 ,chapman wields a razor edge of forcible statement1 and he is inspired by a moral passion that makes his utterance a breathing1 vital thing4--,the ,academy4 ,the author is essentially a critic1 clear and incisive1 at times rather sweeping in his generalities1 yet always fresh and stimulating4 ,his attack on the corruption of ,american politics is as vigorous a piece of writing as one could desire4--,the ,outlook4 ,,charles ,,scribner',s ,,sons1 ,publishers #aec-aeg ,fifth ,ave41 ,new ,york ,transcriber's ,notes3 ,variations in hyphenation have been retained as published in the original book4 ,punctuation has been standardised4 ,the following change has been made3 ,page #ag surge up and are scatttered changed to surge up and are scattered