THE NATURE AND PRICE OF REFORM, (PART I.)
Brooks, John Graham
THE NATURE AND PRICE OF REFORM By JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS MR. BROOKS first gave "The Nature and Price of Reform" to the public at a banquet which was given in his honor on April 29, 1909, in San...
...If you and I have secured at some entertainment a seat better than most of our neighbors, we don't clamor for reform in reseating the audience...
...I heard recently from a friend of Governor Hughes in New York an account of the petty knavery that had gone on in that State for years in furnishing ice to public institutions...
...They are not as you and I, faultless and omnipotent...
...Not one of these letters is twenty years old...
...There isn't a practical idea in the whole bunch...
...Plenty of our great law-breakers know perfectly well that much they do is morally indefensible...
...He talks solemnly of law and order, by which he means that all sorts of folk he doesn't happen to like—those who disturb him or his interests-—are to be seriously dealt with...
...And this is human...
...Weighing the Ice" ST is a pretty term, "weighing the ice...
...From time to time just now, I am hearing that this Republic of ours is in danger, and I hope it is true...
...They are usually prosperous...
...The pretty girl at the dance, with plenty of admirers, doesn't want reform in favor of the wallflowers...
...I know something about politics, and I told 'em they'd no more get that through the legislature, up there, than a man with tallow legs could walk through hell...
...Every blow jars us...
...He was picked out and put in his place by the chief business men in that State...
...was currying favor for high position at Washington...
...How Business Controls Politics THIS utter humiliation was unrealized by the American people until the very dawn of the twentieth century, East and West alike, the great interests had been allowed to pick out senators, governors, congressmen and many of our judges, as a newspaper proprietor picks out his editorial staff and sees to it that they write the opinion he wants...
...Never had the church a nobler field for regenerating service than she has today, and her bitterest enemy could wish her nothing worse than that she should be silent, faltering and inarticulate in hours like these...
...That is their offending and glory...
...First, the secret ballot, together with slow, steady rise of an independent vote which year by year has learned to flout the machine with an assured hardihood which bodes ill for that monopoly...
...We now see that outside certain friendly and family relationships, the man who allows other people to pay his bills is a plain dead beat...
...They could wear chains as as heavy as those, and still boast loudly that they were perfectly free and uninfluenced...
...and—whatever his intellectual cunning—he will despise democracy just as inevitably as he will toady to all manner of exclusion, power and privilege...
...the great fight against the cancerous alliance between political and business monopoly goes on before us, but in every one of those communities the well-fed citizens who are close to the reformers—close to the men who, whatever their motive, are toiling and sweating to win the fight—these same prosperous citizens will tell you how perplexed they are because the reform is led by men they don't feel sure about...
...Cannot we, in and out of the band-wagon, at least tolerate and bear with the commonest human errors and eccentricities for the sake of a cause, the one aim of which is to remove the stain which we have either helped or allowed to smirch our political and business honor...
...You discover at once that the man who tells you this is secretly delighted...
...Nothing more serious has happened than that the fop and imitation aristocrat has broken loose in him...
...Later it was printed in the Liberator...
...I had been no better than my friends, but this brought it home to me and made me for the first time look about me...
...The Vapid Kind of Class Pessimism STILL, this is not quite what is meant by the fashionable pessimism that assures you between drinks that democracy is decaying...
...They said and seemed honestly to think that as noble a type of citizen as Gifford Pinchot was an ignorant and disreputable agitator...
...Yes, common inclusive human sympathy, that without which he cannot well think of Lincoln's greatness any more than we can take the measure for good of all ordinary and lesser men and women...
...Note this, that so recently, men could do these things quite unconcerned and without shame...
...Every canon of good breeding is violated...
...That reform has got to come and the price for it be paid, is at last far too clear for discussion...
...asked the superior...
...It serves here, however, to show the new sensitiveness and the new purpose of our people...
...The Reformer Always the Object of Abuse FROM of old, no leaf of world history has been turned on which one may not read the anger or the scorn which prosperous and conventional people have heaped upon the reformer...
...Well, he had an itching for notoriety...
...I saw I had got to draw the line somewhere and drew it, and stepped on to the other side...
...It is a disposition supercilious toward all reform...
...We, who are in the band-wagon, can look out quite safely and philosophize wisely or smartly about those gripping with the enemy on the fighting line...
...The Basis of Democracy—Human Sympathy THE fixed limit of democracy is sympathy and good will to-ward men—not class sympathy nor clique sympathy—but human sympathy...
...Then in stately succession has come every variation of direct primary with bills paid by the State...
...Never was it otherwise...
...It is a privilege to give to the readers of La follette's this inspiring and illuminating discussion of the great conflict now waging between the forces of Industrial-Political Monopoly and the forces of Real Democracy.—Editor's Note...
...There is no lingering doubt even about the business obligations, and as for the moral issue, it is as clear as that of slavery in the fifties...
...Louis, Chicago, and lesser cities delight in these sheets just as the courtiers of King Charles fed upon the clown wit against the Puritans...
...Does it put a great strain on our intelligence or imagination to understand...
...SUCH thought as I have upon business and political reform concerns the nation and the nation as a whole...
...These are the most commonplace facts about the whole frail average of our human nature...
...The Storm Center of National Reform—Business Monopoly WHAT is it that these new democratic devices attack and disturb...
...He has had, of course, to pay a very heavy price for his acquirements...
...They attack political monopoly and business monopoly, as they are yoked together in a common partnership...
...The Moral Issue and the Church IT is the essential clearness of the moral issue in all this that appeals as with trumpet notes to the Christian church, Catholic and Protestant alike...
...The new truth and the new ways seem vulgar not only because they are new, but because they are associated with the destruction of idols of conventional and customary ways...
...Test it this moment in New York, in New Jersey, Missouri, Wisconsin, Ohio...
...They are nothing if not critical...
...A witty dean of a theological seminary in the East was asked by a parishioner why the devil was so often painted with a smile...
...Three years ago I was in the Northwest among people who had been stealing square leagues of public lands— stealing it by the most despicable and tawdry tricks...
...They often bear the stamp of the college...
...As a nation, we have at last actually set our faces toward controlling the people over against the rule of machine bosses, backed, paid and directed by privileged business interests...
...That he was a "mere theorist" goes without saying, and his motives...
...It is the point of alliance between this business and political monopoly that is today in our country the storm-center of all reform...
...in the mores, the customs of his day...
...He has had to give up every deepest source of wide and common human sympathy...
...The worst form which this temper assumes is a practical contempt of every law that interferes with our interests, and irritation or disgust at every really aggressive and efficient attempt at reform...
...They are only very human, touched by the commonest frailties, often ambitious, sometimes vain, and extremely difficult to get on with at close range...
...more and more popular election of senators, the referendum, initiative and recall...
...We cannot apply it, but the truth we see in it should clean out of our hearts every vice of pharisaism and personal vindictiveness...
...The Protestant church in the forties and fifties cringed and excused herself before the slave issue and never has recovered from the blow.Every religious body faces today a crisis at least as great as slavery and one that will test her as by fire...
...To make the two scales hang even, whatever goes into them, franchises, financial schemes, tariffs, railway rates, land policies, one and all,—to weigh them, to record them so that organized trickeries and unfairness among men shall have an end, are the new and sacred rites upon which we have entered in this country...
...Dozens of these petty tattlers— retailers of demi-monde gossip—get half their living by exploiting these personal prejudices...
...Some mystery of temperament, not perhaps in the least heroic, some awakening experience, throws the reformers into the arena where they take sides against their former selves and for the new duty that challenges them...
...If there were an ideal justice under our control, it should carry some measure of punishment for these ills to pretty much every mother's son and daughter of us...
...BROOKS first gave "The Nature and Price of Reform" to the public at a banquet which was given in his honor on April 29, 1909, in San Francisco, under the auspices of the Citizens' League of Justice...
...Who is the reformer...
...No good thing known to me is without the shadow of peril of some sort...
...Cynicism and satiety...
...It is the essence of reform to disturb and rearrange things...
...But the smiter is the reformer —a most unpleasant fellow...
...I have nine letters written by judges to high railroad officials asking passes for themselves and families, or expressing abject thanks for the free rides and promising to do anything in their power in return to support the railroad interests...
...When they began to nose around here I told 'em everything was all right...
...The old saying, "The man who never made a mistake never made anything," is as true of the reformer as it is of others...
...Democracy never gained one victory over the traditional privilege that was not thought to be attended with vulgarity and bad taste...
...If she fails, her tragedy will be this, that the very wrongdoers to whom she truckles will lose respect for their clerical apologists...
...Rapidly, in state after state, the ignominy is being wiped out...
...The reform was led for a quarter of a century by some of the noblest names in England...
...It has begun from Maine to this sunlit California...
...a disbelief in the more ideal possibilities of men and a sense of weariness and boredom whenever these ideals are presented...
...Every motive that impels him is challenged or gibed at...
...They attack monopoly...
...Instead of Gladstone's trust in the people tempered by prudence, you have distrust tempered by cynicism...
...They said they were investigating the ice bills and wouldn't stop until the public knew exactly what the ice cost and what became of it...
...1 have, however, now in mind a special application of this cynical and bored temper as it appears in the field of political and social questions...
...One I know, who is called a muck-raker, whose first shock was the cool offer of a judgeship by the manager of a very great business...
...That is the definition of a dead beat...
...An Awakening Spirit in America I AM happily under no necessity of theorizing about this as-sertion that a new spirit, a new insight, a new determination have come to us...
...The Curious Demand for a Spotless and Perfect Leader MANY a reformer began by practicing the evils or vices against which later he fights with all his strength...
...They have seen a good deal of the world...
...It is forever a most popular and easy bravery...
...As the connection has grown clear between the big business and free passes to politicians and lawgivers, the revolt has come...
...Lincoln and Garrison Were Self-Seekers to Their Generation TO the fine ladies and gentlemen of the South and to the business men of the North who traded with them, Emerson, Whittier, Sumner, Garrison, Phillips and Lincoln were not only self-seeking agitators, but they were the main occasion for sport and laughter...
...An accomplished German journalist was with Abraham Lincoln on that fateful journey in the great debate...
...angered or irritated by every suggestion of improvement that disturbs things...
...They say now that I was a disappointed, disgruntled man, and there is some truth in it...
...Then you press the question if the cause is just and of such commanding urgency, why must the exact quality of the instrument have such prominence as to obscure and actually to imperil the cause...
...mistakes of judgment, of taste, or of statements...
...The order has gone out to weigh the ice, and there are so many kinds of ice...
...Let that shrivel in the man...
...These cussed reformers," he said, "are no good...
...That, however, should not surprise us...
...When I went home I looked into the mirror," he said, "to see what sort of man was reflected there...
...Free passes were but one, and by no means the worst form of corruption...
...But every man of them was written down at the time blunderer, mountebank, and demagogue...
...That ideal discipline is inaccessible to us...
...he tells you if the fight is lost, then there is neither honor nor real prosperity for the nation as a whole...
...He is an object of flouting and disdain...
...He tells you that the fight for clean and decent citizenship is vital and imperative...
...wherever wrong and injustice hardens into a cake of custom, it has to be smitten and broken to set free the forces of a new life...
...That there can be disinterested devotion to a cause or an idea excites only humorous incredulity...
...It has made the very term "reformer" one of obloquy...
...There is no mystery about this dead-sea fruit...
...I've got this blamed order from headquarters and they are actually going to have us weigh the ice...
...He listened to the half-hearted rebuke and answered: "Come, now, parson, you and I are quits...
...The dean replied: "I am afraid it is because he has found out that many of us clergymen do his devil work so much better than he can do it, that it tickles him...
...They are sure they understand the motives of men and are not to be hoodwinked...
...As we have at last discovered how thousands of our political representatives have been chosen and the price paid, the beginning of a moral shame has risen in this country...
...It is a disposition quick to suspect people's motives...
...A man of this type was once mildly chided by a clergyman for the free use of round and hardy oaths...
...A lawyer of distinct and solid worth in St...
...Yes, many of the reformers are so like the rest of us, with colorless or faulty destinies, that if you are too near to them, the justice and greatness of the cause is likely to be obscured by the noise, the dust, and all the petty exigencies of the conflict...
...I want to tell you a law of our social growth...
...The stopping of campaign contributions, the rapid growth of new city charters with publicity and uniformity of accounting—all these things have come within the memory of men still young...
...he thought Lincoln the limit of intolerable vulgarity...
...Louis told me that "Governor Folk is incorruptible and absolutely right in his fight against the organized corruption of the State, but I don't like him, and many men of influence who know he is right don't like him either, and are working against him...
...The Easy Bravery of the Citizen Onlooker WE are annoyed because, in the heat and smoke of the fray, the reformer makes mistakes...
...Let us for the moment gather them together...
...Why," said this alarmed and outraged heeler...
...the business man who sees things coming his way— who has economic privileges that others lack—hates, above all, the disturber...
...I swear and you pray, but we don't either of us mean anything by it...
...As on a pictured scroll linked events unroll there before our eyes...
...Here are the electric centers of great emotion—hate, contempt, all manner of personal abuse...
...We are better off than our fellows, and the reformer is a nuisance...
...Newspapers, press bureaus spring up or are hired outright to give these animosities or ridicule continuous and dramatic expression for the public ear...
...Even now, quickened moral energies of our youth are seeking other channels outside her sanctuary...
...to take home to ourselves and apply this lesson...
...I have a copy of a letter from the governor of a great State...
...The shadow of one common shame rests upon all of our states...
...So far as she sides against reform her awakening will be rude and her penalty costly and heavy to bear...
...The smart and more fashionable set in New York, Philadelphia, St...
...There is also a fact about reformers worth all the meditation we can give it...
...The moment he shows strength enough to shame people or frighten them in their practices, he becomes the target for ridicule, for merriment or for abuse...
...We have developed in this country an army of this gentry...
...Their accumulated influence has immense significance in our time...
...For those who are supposed to lead in spiritual guidance, to hesitate and shuffle in the present crisis is to imperil every sacred interest for which they stand...
...He writes for a very free family pass and promises fealty to his benefactors...
...He is trying to tell you good news...
...In the background of his mind is a picture of what he fancies is strong government, in which the common ruck of humanity is to be properly kept in its place...
...Almost within living memory the rotten borough system in English politics was wiped out...
...It rested on large landowner-ship...
...But what's the trouble...
...The people whose privileges were attacked honestly thought this...
...When the fraud was in danger of exposure a scared official hurried to his superior...
...In no sense are the evils I am to discuss local or sectional...
...Its origin is in a very old-fashioned selfishness, to which few of us need any introduction...
...health and honor, liberty and justice, peace and good will among men, never in any instant of time are absolute in their security...
...He affronts our taste and hurts sensibilities...
...In religion, politics or science, he is the man who demands a change in the habitual practices of his time...
...This type of citizen is often extremely entertaining, but he should not deceive us...
Vol. 1 • June 1909 • No. 25
