THE NATURE AND PRICE OF REFORM, (PART II.)
Brooks, John Graham
THE NATURE AND PRICE OF REFORM By JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS THE new spirit is turning to the secular issues of regenerated politics and citizenship. There is already a religion of democratic aspiration....
...Now, because it is important, let us do our best to tell the truth...
...What is true in this accusation...
...Who that is not drugged does not know that intellectual and moral freedom are cribbed for large classes in this country...
...He may be a panderer, gambler, protector of criminals...
...The only pessimism you and I need to fear is that which tries to veil this evil and pretend that it is not so bad after all...
...Practically unavoidable was it that we should have allowed the slow growth of the professional politician—the boss, the machine, caucus, and manipulated convention...
...It has developed him and kept him in his place...
...It is no wonder the palace of truth is one excessively uncomfortable place...
...There are powerful business interests that feel themselves under criticism...
...It uses the jury fixer, the man who teaches the people contempt for law and justice...
...It is in innumerable voluntary civic and cultural associations...
...To get control of enough of it is to make the world run after you and do your bidding...
...The devil takes no subtler shape than this...
...he may be that most loathsome creature that walks our streets, the man who organizes the prostitution of womanhood and then lives from the profits of it...
...And these are but a fraction of what you may have if you only win distinction among your fellows in property possession...
...We can't use scape-goats in the Palace of Truth...
...It is so intertwisted with railroads and with banking, with all sorts of speculative investment schemes, that we are lost in the maze of it...
...As easily as she may have a bit of lace over a counter, she can buy a prince of the blood, or a duke with stately historic halls thrown in...
...They will have to be amended and reshaped before they are free from privilege on the one side and the calculating demagogue on the other...
...A very sorry mess we make in trying to excuse or justify ourselves...
...Yet all the time, business seeking special advantages, uses this expert politician as a partner...
...LET us dare to ask the question straight, Why have we, a great and favored people, allowed our politics to sink so low that the mere off-hand comparison with peoples like English, Swiss or German humiliates us...
...I have been very careful to understate my case, one half the truth is all you can bear, and even then people will say, "Oh, what a pessimistic view...
...Let us go Into the Palace of Truth YOU have all heard of the "Palace of Truth...
...All that the sensuous heart of man wants is his for the asking...
...She may find great difficulty in paying his bills, and the dream may turn to ashes,—but she can buy them as she can buy a lord, or no end of dapper little counts and barons and pay their bills...
...Those with which we have to do here and now are large lettered that the simplest minded of us all can read them on the run...
...A Challenge to Individual Liberty WE now see that the noblest cause of all, that of liberty, is challenged,—liberty to think and to act freely according to honest opinions...
...Many people when they get into it, think they are in hell...
...What to us would be the most trivial and innocent bribe-giving, is met in England under the Corrupt Practices Act with swift and instant justice...
...The real pessimism tries to conceal the danger that threatens us...
...The Price of a Money Aristocracy TO possess more than your fellows is to have more power than they, and power since dateless time is what men craved...
...We catch at scape-goats, like "the flood of immigrants or too free a suffrage,"—lies both of them...
...But the very difficulties, now that they can be seen, will add to the fascination of the struggle...
...These are all first steps in the great engagement...
...It is in the schools and universities...
...new charters for our cities, erasing the shame and fatuity of mere party squabbles in the managing of city affairs and then both parties almost suddenly discover the disgrace of accepting, on the sly, large contributions from corporations on the hunt for favors...
...I will ask you to go in with me for a few minutes only...
...Not all women, but he may buy a beautiful woman, or two women...
...They are flaunted as a final damning proof that the people cannot govern themselves...
...Probably not one in this room who is not bound by one or more of these little threads to some of those businesses...
...We have to face our own sins...
...They were baubles, yes, but baubles for which strong men would work like slaves and face death gaily a hundred times...
...They have brought them under such measure of administrative control that municipal and state politics are not debauched...
...Let clergy, doctors, lawyers, teachers trace their income...
...We are bound to them by lines of pecuniary advantage...
...Yet this whole group of crime manufacturers, bound to the saloon as their refuge and help, is allowed and encouraged to do the secret, dirty, and lawless work of hundreds of great business corporations in the United States...
...In shaping our Republic, we dropped out a lot of symbols that have been dear to the heart of the race—titles, nobilities, ribbons, stars, and jeweled garters...
...Clergy, college, teachers and lawgivers are on trial...
...Bribe-giving and bribe-taking have stopped...
...Have we less intelligence, less moral sense, a duller sense of justice...
...The Real Power BUT one thing is luminously clear, the real power in this country has its controlling nerve-ganglion at these points...
...Swiss, German, English, Scandinavians have regulated—socially regulated—these same speculative and monopoly interests...
...really discover the slavery and abasements of it and now rival each other in their hot haste to stop it...
...We fell upon a continent as vast as it was choked with wealth resources...
...is seen in the choosing of our senators by the people...
...Believe me, the way of both courage and hope is to look the evil straight in the face and call it by its proper names...
...I don't live in there, so I won't ask you to "come in...
...No people ever had the chance or the temptation that came to us...
...Monopoly enters into deliberate and systematic relations with him...
...Not all of it, thank God, but (we are in the Palace of Truth) enough of it is true to sober and sadden every well-wisher of this country...
...Are we weaklings that we shuffle and tolerate these things which others have overcome...
...The painted harlot who sells herself on the street is a pattern of virtue compared to that type of man...
...Judged by its fruits, it is the deadliest partnership that exists...
...We cast them aside and it was wisely done, but we had to put something in their place...
...He may buy a seat in the Hall of State or a foreign embassy...
...Every one of us is connected by some of the million tiny fibers that radiate from these charged centers...
...Or if it is the woman who has enough, what may she not buy...
...If you once get into it, you have to tell the truth...
...It has to do with those same great speculative business interests which we have permitted to go without proper social regulation and one result is that our politics are the scorn or the laughter of the world...
...Year by year, it creates a devastating waste of human life, the sheer money cost of which would appall society if we could put it in figures...
...more and more the extended referendum, initiative and recall...
...It is a type of monopoly scattered thick about the United States...
...that the Declaration of Independence is the sorriest bombast...
...For a long time, every one of these democratic devices will be misused and monopoly will appropriate them or counteract them...
...Now, we are on the inside and we can't help either telling the truth or listening to it...
...The Alliance Between Corrupt Business and Corrupt Politics AS a nation, we have been forced to concentrate on those ma-terial symbols, and we have overdone it...
...In its more natural and special form it passes to the direct primary...
...Is America Inferior to Europe...
...It is in the hundred social and college settlements...
...If there is any such thing as "tainted" money, a disconcerting part of all our income will have the stain on it...
...Only one thing remained to us and that is distinction in property possessions...
...The man who should cry out as sufficient excuse, "Oh, but I was held up," would be put in the pillory of public scorn...
...Ladies and gentlemen, this consenting partnership has got to stop in this country...
...We more or less live from them...
Vol. 1 • July 1909 • No. 26
