John Jay Chapman

“ It was this toward which we tended, this that we cared for—action, art, intellect, unselfishness, are they not one thing?
The complete development of every individual is necessary to our complete happiness. And there is no reason why any one who has ever been to a dull dinner party should doubt this. Nay, history gives proof that solitude is dangerous. Man cannot sing, nor write, nor paint, nor reform, nor build, nor do anything except die, alone. The reasons for this are showered upon us by the idea of Froebel, no matter which side of it is turned toward us. ”

“ In so far as virtue shall regain predominance in the breast of the voter and set him free, virtue will replace money in the voting, and set free the State.
Universal suffrage is a mode and a symbol. Under certain conditions of education people must have it. Under others they cannot have it. But whether they have it or not, they will be ruled by their ruling passion, and if this renders them alike in character, their government will be a tyranny. If the reign of the passion be tempered, the reign of the tyrant will be tempered. ”

“ It is certain that the cure for class feeling is public activity. The young jeweller, the young printer, and the golf-player, each, after a campaign in which they have been fighting for a principle, finds that social enjoyment lies in working with people unlike himself, for a common object. Reform movements bring men into touch, into struggle with the powers that are really shaping our destinies, and show them the sinews and bones of the social organism. The absurd social prejudices which unman the rich and the poor alike vanish in a six weeks’ campaign. ”

“ Everything good that has been done in the last fifty years has been done in the teeth of current science. The whole raft of English scientists are children playing with Raphael’s brushes the moment they leave some specialty. There never lived a set of men more blinded by dogma, blinded to the meaning of the past, to the trend of the future, by the belief that they had found new truth. ”

“ If you want to understand the Greek civilization you have got to be Sophocles. If you want to understand the New Testament you have got to be Christ. If you want to understand that most complex and difficult of all things, the present, you must be some or all of it, some of it any way. You must have it ground into you by a contact so wrenchingly close, by a struggle so severe, that you lose consciousness, and afterwards—next year—you will understand.
Here is the reaction familiar to all men since the dawn of history, which makes the man of action the hero of all times. ”

“ And yet so sound is the heart of man that in spite of this corruption and debauchery, the American people, the masses of them, are the most promising people extant. We have a special disease. It is our minds which have been injured. We are cross-eyed with business selfishness and open to the heavens on all other sides. For this openness we must thank Democracy. Here are no warped beings, but sane and healthy creatures under a temporary spell. ”

“ We study this first in social life; for social life is the source and fountain of all things. The touchstone for any civilization is what one man says to another man in the street. Everything else that happens there bears a traceable relation to the tone of his voice. The press reflects it, the pulpit echoes it, the literature reproduces it, the architecture embodies it.
The rays of force which start in material prosperity pass through the focus of social life, and extend out into literature, art, architecture, religion, philosophy. ”

“ It is not the loss of the election which does the harm, but this insult to the souls of men.
Let no one expect the millennium, but let us play fair. We can see that our standards, particularly among the well-to-do, are so low that mere inspection of them causes indignant protest. But we must also know that when we accepted democracy as our form of government we ranked the political education of the individual as more important than the expert administration of government. ”

“ Solomon, Cæsar, Hildebrand, Lincoln, Bismarck, these men knew their world.
But if a virtuous ruler be the prototype of all possible human fulfilment, there is no other art or province of employment to which the same views do not apply. When any man reaps some of the power which his toil has sown, and throws it out as a note or a book or a statue, it has an organic relation to the human soul and is valuable forever. There is only one rule of art. Let a man work at a thing till it looks right to him. ”

“ All the tyrannies and abuses in the world are only bad because they injure this integrity. We desire truth. It is the only thing we desire.69 To have it, we must develop the individual. And there are practical ways and means of doing this. We see that all our abuses are only odious because they injure some individual man’s spirit. We can trace the corruption of politics into business, and find private selfishness at the bottom of it. We can see this spread out into a network of invisible influence, in the form of intellectual dishonesty blighting the minds of our people. ”

“ We all know in a general way that the New Testament civilized Europe. The book is a mere cryptogram of all possible altruism, and therefore fits the soul of man. Give two men the New Testament—and each man sees himself in it, and it affects each one differently. By developing and unfolding the character and emotions of each according to the law of his individual growth, the book differentiates them at once. The more unhappy a man is the more he needs it. Oppress a man or put him in jail, let him lead a life of self-indulgence, or isolation, and he grows quasi-religious ”

“ The effect of this on government is but one of the forms in which the ruling passion is manifest. “What is there in it for me?” is the state of mind in which our people have been existing. Out of this come the popular philosophy, the social life, the architecture, the letters, the temper of the age; all tinged with the passion.
Let us look at the popular philosophy of the day. An almost ludicrous disbelief that any one can be really disinterested is met at once. Any one who takes an intelligent interest in public affairs becomes a “reformer.” ”

“ The boss, then, governs the largest and the most complex business enterprise in the State; and he is always a man of capacity. He is obliged to conduct it in a cumbersome and antiquated manner, and to proceed at every step according to precedent and by a series of fictions. When we consider that the legislators and governors are, after all, not absolute dummies; that among them are ambitious and rapacious men, with here and there an enemy or a traitor to the boss and to his patrons, we see that the boss must be well equipped with the intellect of intrigue. ”

“ Our feeble and floundering citizens’ movements in New York during the last ten51 years show us how hard it is to recover the power of self-government when once lost; how gradual the gain, even under the most stimulating conditions of misrule. Given thirty years of able administration by a single man, and the boss system would have sunk so deep into the popular mind, the arctic crust of prejudice and incompetence would have frozen so deep, that it might easily take two hundred years for the community to come to life. ”

“ The mind of the average lawyer makes the same unconscious allowance for bribery as that of the business man. Moreover, we cannot overlook the cases of simple old-fashioned bribery to which the masses of capital give rise. In a political emergency any amount of money is forthcoming immediately, and it is given from aggregations of capital so large that the items are easily concealed in the accounts. Bribery, in one form or another, is part of the unwritten law. It is atmospheric; it is felt by no one. The most able men in the community believe that society would drop to pieces without bribery. ”

“ The man who has subscribed $1,000 to the reform campaign, the man who has worked for the cause, and the man who has voted the ticket, have met. This personal meeting, this social focus, exists and is indestructible. These people who have been kept apart by the old political conditions, by the boss system, and the capitalist; these men whom every element of selfishness and corruption fought with the instinct of self-preservation to keep separate, have come together. The downfall of the old social system, and the redistribution of every force in the community, is inevitable. ”

“ If you examine the consciousness of any typical minion of success, you will find that his source of inward content lies in a belief that his success has benefited somebody—his kindred, his townsfolk—mankind.
The concentration of every man on his own interests has been the danger and not the safety of Democracy; for Democracy contemplates that every man shall think first of the State and next of himself. ”

“ The Venezuela trouble showed her that her selfish conduct in 1861 made her empire in 1896 insecure. The spread of England’s empire has been due to a practice in dealing with the imagination of others. Establish by force, develop by the organized altruism of good government, protect by display of force.
This system will not apply here. We are the youngest nation and the most naif. We are at the mercy of wise or unwise treatment. But we can no more be fooled than a child. No display of force could touch our imagination or do more than irritate us. ”

“ Altruism does not arise, is not imposed from without, at any period or by any crisis, by progress or by society. The spiral unwinds with the unwinding life upon the globe. It is the form of illusion under which all life proceeds. ”

“ Let us concede for the sake of argument that the full development of individual character and intellect is the aim of life.
Now in so far as individuals are developed, they differ from each other. We ought then to be distressed by any identity whatever found in the heads of individuals examined; and greatly distressed by the reign of the same passion manifested in the one thousand American organisms. ”

“ Herbert Spencer has been a useful church-warden to science, but his knowledge of life was so trifling, his own personal development so one-sided, that his sociology is a farce.
This canon of criticism explains in a very simple manner the art ages, times when apparently every one could paint, or speak, or compose. The art which is lost is really the art of courageous action. Neither war nor dogma nor revolution is necessary, for feeling can no more be lost than force, and the power to express it depends upon an interest in life. ”

“ The rulers of mankind are men who have got control of the symbols, of the institutions, which stood in the imagination of the people as most important, and who by manipulating them extended their range over the popular imagination. Or to put the thing a little differently, the passions of the people are reflected in ever-changing institutions. The people seize a man and force him to do their bidding and rule them in such manner as to assuage their passions. They make a saint out of Lincoln, and a devil out of Torquemada. ”

“ SOCIETY Our institutions have survived, the perils of boss rule are past, and we may look back upon the system with a kind of awe, and recognize how easily the system might have overthrown our institutions and ushered in a period which history would have recorded as the age of the State Tyrants.
Let us imagine that some State like Pennsylvania, on which the boss system had been so firmly fixed that a boss was able to bequeath his seat in the United States Senate to his son, had shown forth an ambitious man, a ruler who realized that his function was not one of business, but one of government ”

“ The Democratic organization takes his money and accepts his moral support, and uses it to build up one end of the machine. It cries, “Reform! Reform! Give us back the principles of Jefferson and of Tilden!”
The Boss-out-of-Power must welcome all popular movements. He must sometimes accept a candidate from a citizens’ committee, sometimes refuse to do so. He must spread his mainsail to the national party wind of the moment. His immense advantage is an intellectual one. He alone knows the principles of the game. He alone sees that the power of the bosses comes from party loyalty. ”

“ A multiplication of institutions then serves two contradictory purposes. It limits the individual, creates black spots of prejudice and unreason in him; but on the other hand it encourages a free development of the individual outside of those spots. It creates types, and types are mutually protective. This is only another way of saying that free government results from a segregation of the government into provinces, which cannot all be captured, at one time, by one force. ”

“ A generation or two was well sacrificed, in this last fusillade of the Dogma of Science—the old guard dogma that dies but never surrenders. Hereafter it will be plain that the whole matter is a matter of symbols on the one hand, knowledge of human nature on the other. ”

“ You cannot bring men together on any other plea, nor hold them together by any other tie. It is only in so far as altruism in conduct exists that progress is possible. If the men will not stop fighting at sundown, they have no institutions. They perish.
The regard that every custom receives from the individual who supports it is a non-self-regarding emotion. From the ceremonials of savages, through the custom of the Frenchman who lifts his hat as a funeral passes, to the feeling of Kant as he contemplated the moral law, the element is the same. ”

“ Then arose the railroad era and tore millions of money from the continent, heaped it in cities, obliterated State lines, centralized everything, controlled everything, ruled everybody—still under these forms.
Let us examine them.
The problem of government is to protect the individuals in a community against each other, and to protect them all against the rest of the world. The power to interfere and the power to represent must be lodged somewhere, and the question is how to arrange it so that this power shall not be turned against the people. Democracy solves it by election. ”

“ The railroad men get up small roads and sell them to the great roads which they control—cheating their stockholders. The purchasing agents of many great enterprises cheat the companies as a matter of course, not by a recognized system of commissions—like French cooks—but by stealth. So in trade, you cannot sell goods to the retailers, unless you corrupt the proper person. It is all politics. All our politics is business and our business is politics. ”