THE NATURE AND PRICE OF REFORM

...A few years later, under the Lord Derby Act, the vote went to the workingman so as to change the equilibrium in the House of Commons, and straightway, in 1870, Gladstone won the principle of free democratic opportunity for the entire English civil service...

...But we, too, are strong enough to stop it, not in another future, but here and now...

...It came from the boarding-houses, it came from a thousand working-class mothers of families that every legitimate business was gaining...

...Then, from the hesitations that spring from fear and uncertainties, he adds, "Of course the thing must stop, but we are not quite strong enough for it yet...

...We, too, have discovered the documents...

...knowing enough of the evils and enough of the remedy to take the first steps, we do one and all league ourselves for justice and pay the full, honest price of reform...

...We and all of us together tarred with the same stick, neither shall the pot nor the kettle call the other black, but all together, we will now enter upon the ways of cleanness, decency and honor...

...We will ask no favors which require darkness...

...It is as with heads bowed under a common shame—that knowing at last the nature of our guilt...

...He made money out of sins and fetcheries...

...If business only means the quicker wealth of certain individuals, then partnership with crime and lawlessness may be good for business, but if we use the word as we should, to stand for the material prosperity of the whole citizenship, there never was a meaner lie told than that business prosperity depends upon protected uncleanness, gambling or purchased politics...

...Let us stop it altogether, let us do it fairly—a little sadly, as with a sense of common blood guiltiness, as if you and I and all of us also had the telltale stains upon our hands...

...They too must have their little or their big illusions, their perverted perspective, their false estimate of values...

...The Fallacy that Reform is bad for Business IT IS this, that truckling, cowardice and mean subservience are necessary for good business...

...In the great open gambling towns of Europe in the last generation, hundreds of important and mighty business men shouted from the housetops: "If you stop this gambling upon the green tables, you'll ruin our towns, people won't come here any more...

...In the gay and fashionable set of any city, where the slavish imitation of extravagance and mannerism becomes a sacred code, this idiotic area is said by shrewd observers to be dangerously enlarged...

...Here are our kings and masters and they have only done what most men would have been mighty glad to do, if they had been smart enough...

...turn our backs upon justice evenly applied or business will suffer...

...Trevellyan, Northcote, and Gladstone alike won because they were backed by a new democratic consciousness and assertion in the State...

...He took gold for these things, thinking perhaps that the Almighty wouldn't think ill of him if the gold was respectably and piously spent...

...Every class has the same chance to buy and take home, if he will, liquor from nearby Boston, but the open saloon which focuses lawlessness in politics, gambling, and vice, that has gone...

...that we cannot disturb the race track, saloon, gambling machines without hurting business...

...What this moment is happening to us...

...Well, the conqueror of Napoleon happened to catch the great sea fighter outside his specialty...

...Ladies and gentlemen, it is a sublime discovery that even material welfare rises as the vices, the injustices and political grafting sink and disappear...

...Early in the fifties, two young reformers opened an attack upon that polite and consecrated monopoly— Charles Trevellyan, who married a sister of Lord Macaulay, and Stafford Northcote...

...Because a new democratic movement was in the air...

...The facts are at last clear enough, the danger grave enough, and the cause sublime enough to put the fire of a great purpose and a great faith into the movement...

...it is to make the words politics and citizenship at least as sacred as the word religion...

...once for all we will break with the jury fixer...

...They were insane against the faddists and theorists, but slowly the evidence came in...

...It will back our lesser reformers as it backed Trevellyan and Northcote...

...once for all we will break with the representatives of race-track and pool-room gamblers...

...Just the same, the shower fell...

...It might be a very pretty theory, but a practical absurdity...

...We had better look to it...

...These same incriminating letters were taken in our day, if I remember, to Rampolla, the great cardinal...

...Is it, therefore, a thing to gape and wonder at, that the people have grown hostile and suspicious...

...So meanly of the American people we will not think...

...once for all we will break with them who, for gold, force women into the ways that take hold on hell, for their own gain...

...What were they submitting to the English public in 1854...

...We now know how we have done this evil...

...The church is now strong enough to stand it, we do not fear them...

...Would they continue to allow the petty blackmailer in city councils and State legislatures to hold up these public-service corporations...

...So many of these corporations have worked in the dark...

...It came from the grocer and the shopkeepers...

...What is meant by "business...

...For years at the start, scores of business men fought fiercely because it would hurt business...

...Many a man high in the business world will tell you in a mood of confidence over his cigar what, as director, president or other official he has felt he had to do to smooth things over and secure what was necessary to his company's interests...

...You have supported representatives that clutched at graft...

...If we all have the idiotic area, they too must have it...

...Again, I hear much of one other dark illusion, namely, that we are not yet strong enough to stop this grafting...

...The hard-headed men of the day had no doubts on this point...

...There is not in my heart one bitter emotion toward these victors in the competitive struggle, but nothing known to me is at the present time so important as the social responsibilities which our kings and masters ought to recognize...

...It was he who stung Luther into nailing those theses onto the door at Wittenberg...

...THAT, I believe to be the great illusion, and I submit this test...

...However diminished, it still remains the source of our pet superstitions and illusions...

...What Determined Business Men Could Do FROM one and all of these rotting alliances we will break away...

...Those frightened business gentlemen were grotesquely mistaken...

...Their immediate pecuniary interests blinded them to the real facts...

...If you will smite the grafter and the panderer, we, too, will smite him...

...We are already strong enough and courageous enough to make an end of it...

...The whole India service was cleaned and strengthened and all England was the gainer...

...No, no, the whole method of it is too grotesque...

...In a hundred cities these leagues should spring into life and knit themselves into a banded strength against which neither the business nor political shyster could hold his own...

...In England within days that many of you can clearly remember, the titled and wealthy set had a monopoly of filling the desirable places in the India civil service with their sons, relatives, or the sons of friends of those to whom they owed political and other favors...

...We will announce a policy of self-respect if you, the people, will support it...

...added freshness to trees and fields...

...With pretty fooling, they caught up wisps of grass and pretended, as the first drops fell, to beat the storm back...

...He caught him on his idiotic area...

...Knowing so little of the shady and concealed manipulations behind, why should the people not strike at them wildly and unfairly...

...Straight through the list beginning with the secret ballot, direct primary, initiative, referendum, recall, direct choice of senators, reform in campaign contribution, new city charters, and all the rest of it that heightened democratic purpose has come to us...

...It flourishes among politicians...

...It is the object of education to narrow that area just as much as possible...

...Is the fool-area in any man's head so ample that he supposes this movement can be stayed or diverted...

...The chief of the educational office wrote that these appointments were the rightful privileges of rank and wealth, and as great a man as Sir James Stephens wrote that society was not half moralized enough for such revolutionary steps...

...it laid the dust...

...And your League of Justice, it should be wide as the nation, because the injustices against which you tilt are national...

...We have not only the swelling tide of democratized devices, but the strengthening organs of the government—Federal, State and city—are directed every year toward deeper and more searching investigation of the exact relation between business buccaneering and political graft and crime...

...It is to rescue business and politics from their in-families...

...Not one of us escapes...

...The great soldier Wellington once met and talked with Lord Nelson without any hint that he had before him the hero of Trafalgar...

...It backs our Roosevelt and Governor Hughes as it backed Gladstone...

...When the gambling was removed, some vocations were injured—suicides, for example, stopped...

...Just that staggering load of misinformation have all those who are telling us that business will suffer if graft in any sneaking form is cut once for all like a piece of rottenness out of the body politic...

...Everybody now sees that those gentlemen were elaborately misinformed...

...Let us offer an illustration true to the life...

...Professors have it, reformers, judges, clergymen have it...

...I once heard a man thus described: "He has the most ponderous and exhaustive stock of misinformation of any one in the commonwealth...

...Why did Trevellyan and Northcote rise against this cabal...

...Railways and the innumerable organized possessions—water, trolleys, lighting, mines, and forest, bound to and dependent on transportation...

...He will tell you that he hates to consent and to wink at these slimy alliances...

...have appropriated, by devious juggleries, those priceless economic privileges through which they could loot the public, and they have done it by the invited cooperation and help of the law-breaker and the criminal...

...Let us call it the idiotic area in the brain...

...He looked at them, read them through and handed them back, saying: "Go ahead...

...Some Delusions of our Great Financiers I OMITTED from my list a large class of masterful business men, those whose daring and vigor have brought them into control of our strategic wealth...

...we will begin in city and State, taking every step above board and in the open where all men may see...

...What, in a sentence, is the cause...

...Can Grafting be Stopped Now...

...The little moral I will not spoil by any comment...

...THE NATURE AND PRICE OF REFORM By JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS I HAVE heard that every one of us has somewhere in the brain a little patch, —varying in size from man to man no doubt,—but each of us has a patch of feeble and partially developed brain cells...

...publish them, by all means...

...For the moment, Nelson blazed out with some of his eccentricities and delusions...

...I once saw on a country road, some children watching an oncoming shower...

...We, the directors of your transportation, lighting and banking, will take this step—-if you, the people, will take it...

...We, too, as a nation have much sinned, we have turned thieveries, lawlessness, and vices into gold for our own pride and fattening...

...To find that out gives us footing solid as granite on which we may stand in the rising crusade against the linked business and political corruption of citizenship in the United States...

...When the Duke went away, he thought he had been talking to a half-fool...

...This is my test, if that honest message went out from the councils of your business kings and masters, would the people play the poltroon...

...Though far less vicious and harmful than our monopoly of privileged business and politics, the English one was vicious enough...

...It hurt business, but whose business...

...If they have the wit of eighth-grade schoolboys, how could they avoid suspicion...

...it cleansed the air...

...I can assume what is true of the East is true also of the West—what is true of Albany, N. Y., is true of Sacramento...

...High-class bawdy-houses suffered, and the trade in cocaine and champagne fell off, but the inhabitants as a whole gained immeasurably in wealth and welfare...

...The full and threatening knowledge of these things is passing rapidly to the people and every day that passes, the man who fights this machine alliance fights with a greater and more determined army at his heels...

...I live in a town of 100,000, in which for more than twenty years not a saloon has existed...

...The monopoly, with its system of secret and personal favoritism was broken, and the India service open to every man squarely on his merits...

...that we must wink at bribers...

...But for this, the private and personal favoritism in that monopoly would have stood like a Gibraltar...

...Obliterate it altogether is impossible...

...Yes, take hold on hell, because that type of male drives her to it and organizes her destruction not even for lust, but for money...

...My question-test is this: If the little group of business men at the top were to face these issues and say bluntly and fearlessly to the people, "We have been doing this shameless and dirty work and you, the people, have been doing it with us...

...A brilliant scholar sent from Germany to lecture at Harvard University told me this incident: A historian of his own country has discovered a batch of letters by the famous Dominican preacher of indulgence, John Tetzel...

...Certain liquor men, some petty grafting politicians, the brothels and the parasitic brood of loan sharks feeding upon the misery of the poor suffered, but their suffering merely spells the better health and prosperity of the entire town...

...Only this, that these desirable positions in the service should be opened to every young man, rich or poor, who could prove by open examination that he was competent for the place—only a bit of even handed justice, yet the fashion, wealth and power of the time rose to a man against it...

...There were fewer people for the undertakers...

...It came from every bank and rent-collector...

...Tetzel had his little private partnership with devils...

...Will you let me guess what just now their most reckless delusion is...

...The Winning Side AND EVEN if a little cowardly, we want to be on the winning side...