John Jay Chapman

“ They are like crowbars that break open the mind of the age. They cannot be dodged, concealed, or laughed away. Every one is aroused from his lethargy by seeing a real man walk on the scene, amid all the stage properties and marionettes of conventional politics. “No fair!” the people cry. They do not vote for him, of course, but they talk about the portent with a vigor no mere doctrine could call forth, and the discussion blossoms at a later date into a new public spirit, a new and genuine demand for better things. ”

“ The world has been going on for so long that we have many such devices, and out of the millions that have been made, all but the very best get discarded as old lumber. These things are the language of the unselfish force upon the globe. It is much nearer truth to think of them as a single influence than as multifarious. Their origin and tendency, their practical utility, the veneration in which they are held, bind them together and make them one. For the world values the seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. ”

“ They have been men emerging from a mist. They see clearly for a moment, and then clouds sweep before them. Vanity, selfishness, ambition, tradition, habit, intervene like a fog. They have been betrayed, too, by the fickle public, that would not stand by them when in trouble. In the recapture of any institution by the forces of honesty there are trenches that get filled by slaughtered honor.
This whole revolution means the invasion of politics by new men. ”

“ But the man who wants nothing for himself, but spends his whole time in so using his mind that he himself disappears, lives only as an influence in the minds of others. He is a song, a theory, a proposition in algebra. These two conflicting forms of force are then flashed up and down, forward and back ceaselessly, through and across every social meeting, through and across society. The novelists and playwrights deal with this instantaneous interplay of motive; and the time-honored analysis of self for self on the villain’s side, and sacrifice for principle on the hero’s side is a true thing. ”

“ How inevitably people are limited by the terms in which they think! A generation of men has been consumed by the shibboleth “reform within the party,”—a generation of educated and right-minded men, who accomplished in their day much good, and left the country better than they found it, but are floating to-day like hulks in the trough of the sea of politics, because all their mind and all their energy were exhausted in discovering certain superficial evils and in fighting them. ”

“ Make it possible for a young man to go into public life untarnished, and as an enemy to every extant evil. You must have men who will not go except on these terms. The times herald such men. They will appear. We must prepare for them.
The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. ”

“ The only difference between a reform movement, so-called, and the private act of any man who desires to better conditions, is that the private man sets one drawing-room in a ferment by speaking his mind or by cutting his friend, and the agitator sets ten thousand in a ferment by attacking the age.
As a practical matter, the conduct of politics depends upon the dinner-table talk of men who are not in politics at all. Government is carried on from moment to moment by the people. The executive is a mere hand and arm. For instance, there is a public excitement about Civil Service Reform. ”

“ The works of men who are great enough to get their whole thought uttered at each deliverance, form a progression like the deductions of a mathematician. These men are never satisfied with a past accomplishment. Their eyes are on questions that beckon to them from the horizon. Their faculties are replenished with new energy because they seek. They are driving their ploughs through a sea of thought, intent, unresting, resourceful, creative. They are discoverers, and just to the extent that lesser men are worth anything they are discoverers too. ”

“ In politics and in morals, all that we condemn, turns out on inspection to be mere selfishness. But anything in the world that we dislike, turns out, on inspection, to be self-regardant effort or avoidance of effort. Bad art may show the gross selfishness of the pot-boiler, or the refined laziness of prejudice, or the mere weakness that was unable to see the world for itself, and has been forced to see it with some one else’s eyes. ”

“ I have never heard any argument given against the wisdom of righteousness, except the existence of evil. “It exists, therefore subserve it.” Is it not clear that evil exists only because people subserve it? It has no fixity. Withdraw your support and it begins to perish. One man says, “Oh, let the world go. All the wickedness and unhappiness in it are inevitable.” Another says, “Some little concession to present conditions must be made.” Nothing can be said to justify the second man that is not moral support to the first. Your concession is always the acknowledgment of somebody’s weakness. ”

“ Further still, there is not a man who does not reveal it in his soul’s anatomy: so much so that upon every occasion except where his interests are touched, he is for virtue, and even where they are touched, it is only a question of a few degrees more heat to dissolve the habits and prejudices of a lifetime, and make him take off his coat and go into a war or a political campaign.
A single man, as we see him in one of the great modern civilizations, looks like a bit of machinery, a cog or a crank or an air-brake. ”

“ You are making it easier for every young man in town to earn his livelihood without paying out his soul and conscience. You cannot help any one man. You are forced into helping them all at once. Every time a man asserts himself he cuts a cord that is strangling somebody. The first time that independent candidates for local office were run in New York City, strong men cried in the street for rage. The supremacy of commerce had been affronted. New York, in all that makes life worth living, is a new city since the reform movements began to break up the torpor of serfdom. ”

“ It is this beneficent current passing from man to man that makes the unity of all efforts for public betterment. You have a movement and an excitement over bad water, and it leaves you with kindergartens in your schools. It is this current that turns your remark at the club (which every one repeated in order to injure you) into a piece of encouragement to the banker’s clerk, who could not have made it himself except at the cost of his livelihood. It is this current—not only the fear of it, but the presence of it—in the heart of your merchants that leaves them at your mercy. ”

“ The boss system, then, appears as the visible part of all the private selfishness in America. It is a great religion of self-interest, with its hierarchy, its chapels, its propaganda, and its confessors in every home. You yourself support it. I saw last week, at your table, a magnate whose business conduct you deplore, and to-day I heard a young man make the comment, that there was no use fighting the current so long as social influence could be bought. Do not accuse Tammany Hall; you yourself have corrupted that young man. ”

“ The unimaginable subtlety of our comprehension enables us to detect selfishness in arts of whose methods we know nothing; we read it like large print. To speak accurately, all we get from any communication is a transcript, an image, a picture of the author’s thought, the jar of intellect and character. Is it supposed that communication between men goes forward by ratiocination, or that education is a thing taken in by linear measurement? Thought cannot creep, but only fly. ”

“ If I had to make my way at the court of Queen Elizabeth, I should need more kinds of wits and more knowledge of human nature than in the New York button trade. No doubt I should be a preoccupied, cringing, and odious sort of person at a feudal festivity; but I should be a fascinating man of genius compared to John H. Painter, who at the age of thirty is making $15,000 a year by keeping his mouth shut and attending to business. ”

“ The identity between public and private life reveals itself the instant a man adopts the plan of indiscriminate truthtelling. He unmasks batteries and discloses wires at every dinner-party; he sees44 practical politics in every law office, and social influence in every convention; and wherever he is, he suddenly finds himself, by his own will or against it, a centre of forces. Let him blurt out his opinion. Instantly there follows a little flash of reality. The shams drop, and the lines of human influence, the vital currents of energy, are disclosed. ”

“ We want honesty. Well, what makes people honest? Honesty. Does anything else spread the influence of honesty, except honesty? Are we here facing a scientific fact? Is this a law of the transference of human energy, or is it not? If it is, you cannot beat it. You cannot imagine any situation where your own total force, in favor of honesty, will consist of anything else than honesty. Of course you may put a case where honesty will result in somebody’s death. ”

“ You can hardly find a man who has not got some form of it. There is no newspaper which does not show signs of it. You can hardly find a man who does not proclaim it to be the elixir of life, the vade-mecum of civilization. What can you do? Why, you can oppose it with other natural forces.
You yourself cannot turn Niagara; but there is not a town in America where one single man cannot make his force felt against the whole torrent. He takes a stand on a practical matter. ”

“ He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart. The instant he declares war, every inducement is offered to make him stop. “Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail” intervene. The instant he stops fighting he is allied with the enemy: he is bought up by prejudice or by fatigue. ”

“ The prejudice against the individual is part of the evil you are fighting. If you keep on in a consistent line of action, people will come to you one by one, and your group will grow into a sort of centre of influence. There will result a unity of method as well as of aim, which, as your purposes become understood, will enable you to act with the speed of thought and the force of an avalanche. 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 want, namely, to raise the general standards. ”

“ The need of the times is not ballot laws but sincerity. The maximum that any man can do toward the spread of sincerity is to display it himself.
All the virtues spread themselves by direct propagation; and the vices likewise. Our people are deficient in righteous indignation. When you see a man righteously indignant, rejoice; this is the seed, this the force. Nothing else will arouse courage but courage, faith but faith. You see, for instance, a knot of men who are really indignant at the injustice of the times. ”

“ The citizen is now confronted with a third ticket, which is a deliberate insult to both the others. No matter what the conditions, it is an appeal which disintegrates the emotions of the voter. This is the very elixir of reform. People are forced to think. It hurts them. They cry out against those who create the dilemma, but they cannot escape it. The vote you poll will vary. If the party war-cries are intense and the party candidates promise fairly, very few men will see the point of your movement. But no one escapes its influence. Let us say that five thousand vote your ticket. ”

“ As the community returns to life, it sees the natural world for a moment and then forgets it. The blood flushes the brain and then recedes. You yourself voted once against both parties, when you thought you could win, and when you were excited. You quoted Isaiah and I know not what poetry, and were out and out committed to principle; but to-day you are cold and hopeless. At present, hope is a mystery to you. Nevertheless the utility of those early reform movements survives. They heated the imagination of the people till the people had a momentary vision of truths which not all of them forgot ”

“ We see most men like tee-totums spinning to the left and leading a dismal life. How shall we get their motive power to spin them to the right, and make them happy? The practical question is: how to use the power of sunlight to turn our mills. How can we hold up a prism to the times that shall disintegrate these rays of complex force, and then adjust a lens that shall focus the powers of good and make them turn the wheels of society? ”

“ Julius Cæsar did no more.
137 The strands of prejudice and passion that bind people together pulsate with life. All these fellow-citizens are human beings, and there is no one of them whom we cannot understand, reach, influence. The ordinary modes of intercourse are at hand. Chief among them you find the great machinery of government. It dwarfs every other agency, whether for good or ill. In America this machinery was designed to be at the service of anybody. It is an advertising agency for ideas, and it is very much more than this; since the fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. ”

“ There exists, consequently, an unformulated belief that the corruption of politics is something by itself. Yet there probably never was a35 civilization where the mesh of all powers and interests was so close. It is like the interlocking of roots in a swamp. Such density and cohesion were never seen in any epoch, such a mat and tangle of personalities, where every man is tied up with the fibres of every other. If you take an axe or a saw, and cut a clean piece out of it anywhere, you will maim every member of society. ”

“ The whole of practical life is made up of contact with the passions of others. A lawyer or a broker is like an engineer who sits behind his machine, managing its levers and its stopcocks. A trader, a writer, or a philanthropist, a laborer or a clergyman, does nothing but open and shut valves in other people. ”