The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him Part 68

"That is the aristocratic idea. That the better element, so called, shall compel the ma.s.ses to be good, whether they wish it or no. Just as one makes a child behave without regard to its own desires. With grown men, such a system only results in widening the distance between the cla.s.ses and ma.s.ses, making the latter more dependent and unthinking.

Whereas, if we make every man vote he must think a little for himself, because different people advise him contrarily, and thus we bring him nearer to the more educated. He even educates himself by his own mistakes; for every bad man elected, and every bad law pa.s.sed, make him suffer the results, and he can only blame himself. Of course we don't get as good a government or laws, but then we have other offsetting advantages."

"What are those?"

"We get men and laws which are the wish of the majority. Such are almost self-supporting and self-administering. It is not a mere combination of words, printing-ink, and white paper which makes a law. It is the popular sentiment back of it which enforces it, and unless a law is the wish of a majority of the people who are to be governed by it, it is either a dead letter, or must be enforced by elaborate police systems, supported oftentimes with great armies. Even then it does not succeed, if the people choose to resist. Look at the attempt to govern Ireland by force, in the face of popular sentiment. Then, too, we get a stability almost unknown in governments which do not conform to the people. This country has altered its system of government less than any other great country in the last hundred years. And there is less socialistic legislation and propaganda here than anywhere else. That is, less discontent."

"But, Peter, if the American people are as sensible as you think, how do you account for the kind of men who exercise control?" said Le Grand.

"By better men not trying."

"But we have reform movements all the time, led by good men. Why aren't these men elected?"

"Who are as absolutely inexperienced and blind as to the way to influence votes, as well can be. Look at it, as a contest, without regard to the merit of the cause. On one side we have bosses, who know and understand the men in their wards, have usually made themselves popular, are in politics for a living, have made it a life-study, and by dear experience have learned that they must surrender their own opinions in order to produce harmony and a solid vote. The reformer, on the contrary, is usually a man who has other occupations, and, if I may say so, has usually met with only partial success in them. By that I mean that the really successful merchant, or banker, or professional man cannot take time to work in politics, and so only the less successful try. Each reformer, too, is sure that he himself is right, and as his bread and b.u.t.ter is not in the issue, he quarrels to his heart's content with his a.s.sociates, so that they rarely can unite all their force. Most of the reform movements in this city have been attempted in a way that is simply laughable. What should we say if a hundred busy men were to get together to-morrow, and decide that they would open a great bank, to fight the clearing-house banks of New York? Yet this, in effect, is what the reformers have done over and over again in politics. They say to the men who have been kept in power for years by the people, 'You are scoundrels. The people who elected you are ignorant We know how to do it better. Now we'll turn you out.' In short, they tell the majority they are fools, but ask their votes. The average reformer endorses thoroughly the theory 'that every man is as good as another, and a little better.' And he himself always is the better man. The people won't stand that. The 'holier than thou' will defeat a man quicker in this country than will any rascality he may have done."

"But don't you think the reformer is right in principle?"

"In nine cases out of ten. But politics does not consist in being right.

It's in making other people think you are. Men don't like to be told that they are ignorant and wrong, and this a.s.sumption is the basis of most of the so-called educational campaigns. To give impetus to a new movement takes immense experience, shrewdness, tact, and many other qualities. The people are obstructive--that is conservative--in most things, and need plenty of time."

"Unless _you_ tell them what they are to do," laughed Watts. "Then they know quick enough."

"Well, that has taken them fifteen years to learn. Don't you see how absurd it is to suppose that the people are going to take the opinions of the better element off-hand? At the end of a three months' campaign?

Men have come into my ward and spoken to empty halls; they've flooded it with campaign literature, which has served to light fires; their papers have argued, and n.o.body read them. But the ward knows me. There's hardly a voter who doesn't. They've tested me. Most of them like me. I've lived among them for years. I've gone on their summer excursions. I've talked with them all over the district. I have helped them in their troubles. I have said a kind word over their dead. I'm G.o.dfather to many. With others I've stood shoulder to shoulder when the bullets were flying.

Why, the voters who were children when I first came here, with whom I use to sit in the angle, are almost numerous enough now to carry an election as I advise. Do you suppose, because speakers, unknown to them, say I'm wrong, and because the three-cent papers, which they never see, abuse me, that they are going to turn from me unless I make them? That is the true secret of the failure of reformers. A logical argument is all right in a court of appeals, but when it comes to swaying five thousand votes, give me five thousand loving hearts rather than five thousand logical reasons."

"Yet you have carried reforms."

"I have tried, but always in a practical way. That is, by not antagonizing the popular men in politics, but by becoming one of them and making them help me. I have gained political power by recognizing that I could only have my own way by making it suit the voters. You see there are a great many methods of doing about the same thing. And the boss who does the most things that the people want, can do the most things that the people don't want. Every time I have surrendered my own wishes, and done about what the people desire, I have added to my power, and so have been able to do something that the people or politicians do not care about or did not like."

"And as a result you are called all sorts of names."

"Yes. The papers call me a boss. If the voters didn't agree with me, they would call me a reformer."

"But, Peter," said Le Grand, "would you not like to see such a type of man as George William Curtis in office?"

"Mr. Curtis probably stood for the n.o.blest political ideas this country has ever produced. But he held a beacon only to a small cla.s.s. A man who writes from an easy-chair, will only sway easy-chair people. And easy-chair people never carried an election in this country, and never will. This country cannot have a government of the best. It will always be a government of the average. Mr. Curtis was only a leader to his own grade, just as Tim Sullivan is the leader of his. Mr. Curtis, in his editorials, spoke the feelings of one element in America. Sullivan, in Germania Hall, voices another. Each is representative, the one of five per cent. of New York; the other of ninety-five per cent. If the American people have decided one thing, it is that they will not be taken care of, nor coercively ruled, by their better element, or minorities."

"Yet you will acknowledge that Curtis ought to rule, rather than Sullivan?"

"Not if our government is to be representative. I need not say that I wish such a type as Mr. Curtis was representative."

"I suppose if he had tried to be a boss he would have failed?"

"I think so. For it requires as unusual a combination of qualities to be a successful boss, as to be a successful merchant or banker. Yet one cannot tell. I myself have never been able to say what elements make a boss, except that he must be in sympathy with the men whom he tries to guide, and that he must be meeting them. Mr. Curtis had a broad, loving nature and sympathies, and if the people had discovered them, they would have liked him. But the reserve which comes with culture makes one largely conceal one's true feelings. Super-refinement puts a man out of sympathy with much that is basic in humanity, and it needs a great love, or a great sacrifice of feeling, to condone it. It is hard work for what Watts calls a tough, and such a man, to understand and admire one another."

"But don't you think," said Mrs. D'Alloi, "that the people of our cla.s.s are better and finer?"

"The expression 'n.o.blesse oblige' shows that," said madame.

"My experience has led me to think otherwise," said Peter. "Of course there is a difference of standards, of ideals, and of education, in people, and therefore there are differences in conduct. But for their knowledge of what is right and wrong, I do not think the so-called better cla.s.ses, which should, in truth, be called the prosperous cla.s.ses, live up to their own standards of right any more than do the poor."

"Oh, I say, draw it mild. At least exclude the criminal cla.s.ses," cried Watts. "They know better."

"We all know better. But we don't live up to our knowledge. I crossed on one of the big Atlantic liners lately, with five hundred other saloon pa.s.sengers. They were naturally people of intelligence, and presumably of easy circ.u.mstances. Yet at least half of those people were plotting to rob our government of money by contriving plans to avoid paying duties truly owed. To do this all of them had to break our laws, and in most cases had, in addition, to lie deliberately. Many of them were planning to accomplish this theft by the bribery of the custom-house inspectors, thus not merely making thieves of themselves, but bribing other men to do wrong. In this city I can show you blocks so densely inhabited that they are election districts in themselves. Blocks in which twenty people live and sleep in a single room, year after year; where the birth of a little life into the world means that all must eat less and be less warm; where man and woman, old and young, must shiver in winter, and stifle in summer; where there is not room to bury the people who live in the block within the ground on which they dwell. But I cannot find you, in the poorest and vilest parts of this city, any block where the percentage of liars and thieves and bribe-givers is as large as was that among the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers of that floating palace. Each condition of society has its own mis-doings, and I believe varies little in the percentage of wrong-doers to the whole."

"To hear Peter talk you would think the whole of us ought to be sentenced to life terms," laughed Watts. "I believe it's only an attempt on his part to increase the practice of lawyers."

"Do you really think people are so bad, Peter?" asked Leonore, sadly.

"No. I have not, ten times in my life, met a man whom I should now call bad. I have met men whom I thought so, but when I knew them better I found the good in them more than balancing the evil. Our mistake is in supposing that some men are 'good' and others 'bad,' and that a sharp line can be drawn between them. The truth is, that every man has both qualities in him and in very few does the evil overbalance the good. I marvel at the goodness I find in humanity, when I see the temptation and opportunity there is to do wrong."

"Some men are really depraved, though," said Mrs. D'Alloi.

"Yes," said madame. "Think of those strikers!"

Peter felt a thrill of pleasure pa.s.s through him, but he did not show it. "Let me tell you something in connection with that. A high light in place of a dark shadow. There was an attempt to convict some of the strikers, but it failed, for want of positive evidence. The moral proof, however, against a fellow named Connelly was so strong that there could be no doubt that he was guilty. Two years later that man started out in charge of a long express, up a seven-mile grade, where one of our railroads crosses the Alleghanies. By the lay of the land every inch of that seven miles of track can be seen throughout its entire length, and when he had pulled half way up, he saw a section of a freight train coming down the grade at a tremendous speed. A coupling had broken, and this part of the train was without a man to put on the brakes. To go on was death. To stand still was the same. No speed which he could give his train by backing would enable it to escape those uncontrolled cars. He sent his fireman back to the first car, with orders to uncouple the engine. He whistled 'on brakes' to his train, so that it should be held on the grade safely. And he, and the engine alone, went on up that grade, and met that flying ma.s.s of freight. He saved two hundred people's lives. Yet that man, two years before, had tried to burn alive forty of his fellow-men. Was that man good or bad?"

"Really, chum, if you ask it as a conundrum, I give it up. But there are thoroughly and wholly good things in this world, and one of them is this stuffing. Would it be possible for a fellow to have a second help?"

Peter smiled. "Jenifer always makes the portions according to what is to follow, and I don't believe he'll think you had better. Jenifer, can Mr.

D'Alloi have some more stuffing?"

"Yissah," said Jenifer, grinning the true darkey grin, "if de gentmun want't sell his ap't.i.te foh a mess ob potash."

"Never mind," said Watts. "I'm not a dyspeptic, and so don't need potash. But you might wrap the rest up in a piece of newspaper, and I'll take it home."

"Peter, you must have met a great many men in politics whom you knew to be dishonest?" said Mrs. D'Alloi.

"No. I have known few men whom I could call dishonest. But then I make a great distinction between the doer of a dishonest act and a dishonest man."

"That is what the English call 'a fine-spun' distinction, I think," said madame.

"I hope not. A dishonest man I hold to be one who works steadily and persistently with bad means and motives. But there are many men whose lives tell far more for good than for evil in the whole, yet who are not above doing wrong at moments or under certain circ.u.mstances. This man will lie under given conditions of temptations. Another will bribe, if the inducement is strong enough. A third will merely trick. Almost every man has a weak spot somewhere. Yet why let this one weakness--a partial moral obliquity or imperfection--make us cast him aside as useless and evil. As soon say that man physically is spoiled, because he is near-sighted, lame or stupid. If we had our choice between a new, bright, keen tool, or a worn, dull one, of poor material, we should not hesitate which to use. But if we only have the latter, how foolish to refuse to employ it as we may, because we know there are in the world a few better ones."

"Is not condoning a man's sins, by failing to blame him, direct encouragement to them?" said Mrs. D'Alloi.

"One need not condone the sin. My rule has been, in politics, or elsewhere, to fight dishonesty wherever I found it. But I try to fight the act, not the man. And if I find the evil doer beyond hope of correction, I do not antagonize the doer of it. More can be done by amity and forbearance than by embittering and alienating. Man is not bettered by being told that he is bad. I had an alderman in here three or four days ago who was up to mischief. I could have called him a scoundrel, without telling him untruth. But I didn't. I told him what I thought was right, in a friendly way, and succeeded in straightening him out, so that he dropped his intention, yet went away my friend. If I had quarrelled with him, we should have parted company, he would have done the wrong, I should have fought him when election time came--and defeated him. But he, and probably fifty of his adherents in the ward would have become my bitter enemies, and opposed everything I tried in the future. If I quarrelled with enough such men, I should in time entirely lose my influence in the ward, or have it generally lessened.

But by dealing as a friend with him, I actually prevented his doing what he intended, and we shall continue to work together. Of course a man can be so bad that this course is impossible, but they are as few in politics as they are elsewhere."

"Taciturnity Stirling in his great circus feat of riding a whole ward at once," said Watts.

"I don't claim that I'm right," said Peter. "I once thought very differently. I started out very hotly as a reformer when I began life.

But I have learned that humanity is not reformed with a club, and that if most people gave the energy they spend in reforming the world, or their friends, to reforming themselves, there would be no need of reformers."

"The old English saying that 'people who can't mind their own business invariably mind some one's else,' seems applicable," said Watts.

"But is it not very humiliating to you to have to be friends with such men?" said Mrs. D'Alloi.