Jane Addams

“ As the policeman who makes terms with vice, and almost inevitably slides into making gain from vice, merely represents the type of politician who is living off the weakness of his fellows, so the over-zealous reformer who exaggerates vice until the public is scared and awestruck, represents the type of politician who is living off the timidity of his fellows. With the lack of civic machinery for simple democratic expression, for a direct dealing with human nature as it is, we seem doomed to one type or the other—corruptionists or anti-crime committees. ”

“ Added to the conscience which protests against the social waste of child labor, we have the taste that revolts against a product totally without the charm which pleasure in work creates. We may at last discover that we are imperiling our civilization at the moment of its marked materialism, by wantonly sacrificing to that materialism the eternal spirit of youth, the power of variation, which alone is able to prevent it from degenerating into a mere mechanism. ”

“ Have Americans formed a sort of “imperialism of virtue,” holding on to preconceived ideals of government and insisting that they must fit all the people who come to our shores, even though they crush the most promising bits of self-expression in the process? Is the American attitude toward self-government like that of the Anglo-Saxon towards civilization, save that he goes forth to rule all the nations of the earth by one pattern, while we remain at home and bid them to rule themselves by one pattern? ”

“ Why is it that women do not vote upon the matters which concern them so intimately? Why do they not follow these vital affairs and feel responsible for their proper administration, even though they have become municipalized? What would the result have been could women have regarded the suffrage, not as a right or a privilege, but as a mere piece of governmental machinery without which they could not perform their traditional functions under the changed conditions of city life? Could we view the whole situation as a matter of obligation and of normal development, it would be much simplified. ”

“ Society regarded machinery as the absolute possession of the man who owned it at the moment it became a finished product, quite irrespective of the long line of inventors and workmen who represented its gradual growth and development. Society was, therefore, destined to all the maladjustment which this century has encountered. Is it the militant spirit once more as over against the newer humanitarianism? The possessor of the machine, like the possessor of arms who preceded him, regards it as a legitimate weapon for exploitation, as the former held his sword. ”

“ When an entire class in a community confess that without an appeal to arms they cannot deal with trades unions, who, after all, represent a national and international movement a hundred years old, they practically admit that they cannot manage their business under the existing conditions of modern life. To a very great extent it is a confession of weakness, to a very great extent a confession of frailty of temper. To make the adjustment to the peculiar problems of one’s own surroundings is the crux of life’s difficulties. ”

“ It was as if the ancient prophet foresaw that under an enlightened industrialism peace would no longer be an absence of war, but the unfolding of world-wide processes making for the nurture of human life. He predicted the moment which has come to us now that peace is no longer an abstract dogma but has become a rising tide of moral enthusiasm slowly engulfing all pride of conquest and making war impossible. ”

“ The sense that none of us is living up to the best idea of democracy is upon each of us.... Miss Addams is bound to receive a respectful hearing. As a leader who ever prays to lead aright, a sociologist who is willing to test her theories in a practical and personal way, a theorist who is not ashamed to own when she has been mistaken, a friend who will remain true to her friend no matter what may arise, and a person of leisure and power, who has the civic interest at heart, she has come to be prized as one of the chief of citizens.”—Chicago Tribune. ”

“ It is no easy task to detect and to follow the tiny paths of progress which the unencumbered proletarian with nothing but his life and capacity for labor, is pointing out for us. These paths lead to a type of government founded upon peace and fellowship as contrasted with restraint and defence. They can never be discovered with the eyes of the doctrinaire. From the nature of the case, he who would walk these paths must walk with the poor and oppressed, and can only approach them through affection and understanding. The ideals of militarism would forever shut him out from this new fellowship. ”

“ Certainly in America we have a chance to employ something more active and virile, more inventive, more in line with our temperament and tradition, than the mere desire to increase commercial relations by armed occupation as other governments have done. A different conduct is required from a democracy than from the mere order-keeping, bridge-building, tax-gathering Roman, or from the conscientious Briton carrying the blessings of an established government and enlarged commerce to all quarters of the globe. ”

“ Because their idealism was of the type that is afraid of experience, these founders refused to look at the difficulties and blunders which a self-governing people were sure to encounter, and insisted that, if only the people had freedom, they would walk continuously in the paths of justice and righteousness. It was inevitable, therefore, that they should have remained quite untouched by that worldly wisdom which counsels us to know life as it is, and by that very modern belief that if the world is ever to go right at all, it must go right in its own way. ”

“ In the midst of the modern city which, at moments, seems to stand only for the triumph of the strongest, the successful exploitation of the weak, the ruthlessness and hidden crime which follow in the wake of the struggle for existence on its lowest terms, there come daily—at least to American cities—accretions of simple people, who carry in their hearts a desire for mere goodness. ”

“ How shall it be made to seem as magnificent patiently to correct the wrongs of industrialism as to do battle for the rights of the nation? This transition ought not to be so difficult in America, for to begin with, our national life in America has been largely founded upon our success in invention and engineering, in manufacturing and commerce. Our prosperity has rested upon constructive labor and material progress, both of them in striking contrast to warfare. ”

“ And one sort or the other we will continue to have so long as we distrust the very energy of existence, the craving for enjoyment, the pushing of vital forces, the very right of every citizen to be what he is without pretense or assumption of virtue. Too often he does not really admire these virtues, but he imagines them somewhere as a standard adopted by the virtuous whom he does not know. That old Frankenstein, the ideal man of the eighteenth century, is still haunting us, although he never existed save in the brain of the doctrinaire. ”

“ A clever man once told me that he doubted whether an alderman could be elected in a tenement-house district unless he had had gang experience, and had become an adept in the interminable discussion which every detail of the gang’s activity receives. This alone affords a training in democratic government, for it is the prerogative of democracy to invest political discussion with the dignity of deeds, and to provide adequate motives for discussion. In these social folk-motes, so to speak, the young citizen learns to act upon his own determination. ”

“ We find ourselves in this plight because our modern morality has lacked fibre, because our humanitarianism has been much too soft and literary, and has given itself over to unreal and high-sounding phrases. It appears that our only hope for a genuine adjustment of our morality and courage to our present social and industrial developments, lies in a patient effort to work it out by daily experience. ”

“ At the bottom is the small savage community in a perpetual state of warfare; at the top an orderly society stimulated and controlled by recognized ideals of social justice. In proportion as the savage society comes under the dominion of a common moral consciousness, it moves up, and in proportion as the civilized society reverts to the use of brute force, it goes down. Reversion to that brute struggle may at any moment cost the destruction of the painfully acquired bonds of equity, the ties of mutual principle, which are wrought with such effort and loosed with such ease. ”

“ When the State protects its civic resources, as it formerly defended its citizens in time of war, industrialism versus militarism comes to be nurture versus conquest. In order to trace the displacement of the military ideals of patriotism by those of a rising concern for human welfare, we must take an accounting between those forms of governmental machinery and social organization which are the historic outgrowth of conquest and repression and the newer forms arising in their midst which embody the social energy instantly recognizable as contemporaneous with our sincerest moral life. ”

“ It is part of your new vocation to adjust the industries now tributary to the standing armies and organization of warfare, to useful and beneficent occupations; to transform and readjust all their dependent industries, from the manufacturing of cannon and war-ships to that of gold braid and epaulets. It is your mission to revive and increase agriculture, industry, and commerce, by diverting all the energy which is now directed to the feeding, clothing, and arming of the idle, into the legitimate and normal channels of life. ”

“ If we would adduce evidence that we are emerging from a period of industrialism into a period of humanitarianism, it is to such quarters that we must betake ourselves. These are the places in which it is easiest to study the newer manifestations of government, in which personal welfare is considered a legitimate object; for a new history of government begins with an attempt to make life possible and human in large cities, in those crowded quarters which exhibit such an undoubted tendency to barbarism and degeneracy when the better human qualities are not nourished. ”

“ To seek our patriotism in some age other than our own is to accept a code that is totally inadequate to help us through the problems which current life develops. We continue to found our patriotism upon war and to contrast conquest with nurture, militarism with industrialism, calling the latter passive and inert and the former active and aggressive, without really facing the situation as it exists. ”

“ We would ask the moralists and statesmen of this dawning century, equipped as they are, with the historic method, to save our contemporaries from skepticism in regard to self-government by revealing to them its adaptability to the needs of the humblest man who is so sorely pressed in this industrial age. The statesman who would fill his countrymen with enthusiasm for democratic government must not only possess a genuine understanding of the needs of the simplest citizens, but he must know how to reveal their capacities and powers. ”

“ We firmly decline not only to consider matters of industry and commerce as germane to government, but we also decline to bring men together upon that most natural and inevitable of all foundations, their industrial needs.
The government which refuses to consider matters of this sort, or at least waits until their neglect becomes a scandal before it consents to deal with them, as a result of this caution forces the most patriotic citizens to ignore the Government and to embody their scruples and hopes of progress in voluntary organizations. ”

“ This dramatic and feverish triumph of the self-seeker, see-sawing with that of the interested reformer, does more than anything else, perhaps, to keep the American citizen away from the ideals of genuine evolutionary democracy. Whereas repressive government, from the nature of the case, has to do with the wicked who are happily always in a minority in the community, a normal democratic government would naturally have to do with the great majority of the population in their normal relations to each other. ”

“ It is surprising how a simple experience, if it be but genuine, gives an opening into citizenship altogether lacking to the more grandiose attempts. A Greek-American, slaughtering sheep in a tenement-house yard, reminiscent of the Homeric tradition, can be made to see the effect of the improvised shambles on his neighbor’s health and the right of the city to prohibit the slaughtering, only as he perceives the development of city government upon its most modern basis. ”