First, not letting people be bad. (Moses.)
Second, being good for them. (Karl Marx.)
Third, letting them be good themselves. (Any Democrat.)
The first of these ideas means government by Prison. The second, means government by Usurpation, that is, the moment a man amounts to enough to choose to do right or do wrong of his own free will, the moment he is a man, in other words, being so afraid of him and of his being a man, that we all, in a kind of panic, shove into his life and live it for him--this is Socialism, a scared machine that scared people have invented for not letting people choose to do right because they may choose to do wrong.
The third, letting people be good themselves, letting them be self-controlling, self-respecting, self-expressing or voluntarily good people, is democracy, a machine for letting men be men by trying it.
Moses was the inventor of a kind of national moral-brake system, a machine for stopping people nine times out of ten. The question that faces President Wilson just now, while the world looks on is, "Is a government or is it not a moral-brake system--a machine for stopping people nine times out of ten?"
There is a considerable resemblance between Moses" position and the new President"s in the United States. When Moses looked around on the things he saw the men around him doing, and took the ground that at least nine out of ten of the things should be stopped, he was academically correct.
And so, also, President Wilson, gazing at the business of this country to-day, at nine out of ten of the humdrum thoughtless things that trusts and corporations have been doing, will be academically correct in telling them to stop, in having his little, new, helpless, unproved, adolescent government stand up before all the people and speak in loud, beautiful, clear accents and (with its left fist full of prisons, fines, lawyers, of forty-eight legislatures all talking at once) bring down its right fist as a kind of gavel on the world and say to these men, before all the nations, that nine of the things they are doing must be stopped and that one of the things, if they happen to able be to think out some way of keeping on doing it--n.o.body will hurt them.
But the question before President Wilson, to-day, with all our world looking on, is not whether he would be right in entering upon a career of stopping people. The real and serious question is, does stopping people stop them? And if stopping people does not stop them, what will?
Perhaps the way for a government to stop people from doing things they are doing, is to tell them the things it wants done. A government that does not express what it wants, that has not given a masterful, clear, inspired statement of what it wants--a government that has only tried to say what it does not want, is not a government.
The next business of a government is a statement of what it wants.
The problem of a government is essentially a problem of statement.
How shall this statement be made?
CHAPTER IV
THE PRESIDENT SAYS YES AND NO
It was not merely because the seventh commandment was negative, but because it was abstract that David found it so hard to keep. If the seventh commandment (like Uriah"s wife) could have had deep blue eyes or could have been beautiful to look upon, and, on a particular day in a particular place, could have been bathing in a garden, David would have found keeping it a very different matter. The tendency to make a statue of purity as a lovely female figure carries us a little further in moral evolution, than the moral statement that Moses had managed to get, and it was further toward the concrete, but it was not far enough for a real artist or man who does things.
One of the things about the real artist that makes him an artist, is that he is always and always has been and always will be profoundly dissatisfied with a statue of a female figure as an emblem of purity. He challenges the world, he challenges G.o.d, he challenges himself, he challenges the men and women about him when he is being put off with a Statue as an emblem of purity. He demands, searches out, interprets, creates something concrete and living to express his idea of purity.
How can President Wilson, in getting the Trusts not to be corrupt, in trying to win them--how can President Wilson make the law alluring? How can he make the People have a Low Voice?
A great deal if not nearly everything depends in tempting business men to be good, upon the tone in which they are addressed. Every government, like every man, soon comes to have its own characteristic tone in addressing the people. And, as a matter of fact, it is almost always the tone in a government, like the voice in a man, which tells us the most definitely what it is like, and is the most intimate and effective expression of what it wants and is the most practical way of getting what it wants. Everybody has noticed that a man"s voice works harder for him, works more to the point for him in getting what he wants than his words do. It is his voice that makes people know him, that makes them know he means what he says. It is his voice that tells them whether he is in the habit of meaning what he says, and it is his voice that tells them whether he is in habit of getting what he wants, and of knowing what to do with what he wants when he gets it.
A government does not need to say very much if it has the right tone.
The tone of a government is the government.
If President Wilson is going to succeed in tempting business men to be good, he is going to do it, some of us think, by depending on three principles.
These three principles, like all live, active principles, may be stated as three principles or as three personal traits.
First, by being affirmative. (Isaiah, in distinction from Moses.)
Second, by being concrete. (Bathsheba.)
Third, by being specific, by seeing the universal in the particular.
(Like any artist or man who does things.)
The value of being affirmative and the value of being concrete have already been touched upon. There remains the value of being specific.
Possibly, in this present happy hour, when our country has grown suddenly sensible and has become practical enough to pick out at last, once more, a President with a real serious working sense of humour, even a sense of humour about himself, it may not be considered disrespectful if I continue a little longer dropping in on the Government, and saying what I have to say in a few plain and homely words.
The trouble with most people in being economical with their money is, that when they spend it, they spend it on something in particular, and when they save it, they try to save it in a kind of general way. The same principle applies to doing right. It is because when people do right, they do it in a kind of general pleasant, abstract way, and when they do wrong they always do something in particular, that they are so Wicked.
A man will do almost anything to save his life at a particular place and at a particular time, say at ten o"clock to-morrow morning, if he is drowning, but if he has a year to save it in, a year of controlling his appet.i.tes, of daily, detailed mastering of his spirit, of not taking a piece of mince pie, of stopping his work in time and of going to bed early, he will die.
It is easier when one is going under water for the third time and sees a rope, to stretch just one inch more and grasp the rope, reach up to forty more years of one"s life, all concentrated for one on the tip of a rope, than it is to spread out saving one"s life over a whole year, 365 breakfasts, 365 luncheons, 365 dinners, 33,365 moments of anger, of reckless worry, of remorse, of self-pity, 40,000 of despair and round up with a swing at the end of one"s year at the tiptop of one"s being, as if it had only taken five minutes. And yet it is only an act of the creative imagination of seeing the whole, of having a happy, daily, detailed spectacle of the end in view, that is, of the part in its setting of the whole--going without a piece of mince pie. If one could only make one"s self see the piece of mince pie as it is, it would not be difficult. If one could see it on the plate there and see the not taking it as a little wedge-shaped rivet, a little triangular link of coupling in the chain that keeps one holding on forty years longer to this planet, a piece of mince pie left on a plate would become a Vision.
This seems to be the principle that works best in getting other people to be good.
Perhaps the President will succeed in getting Trusts to be good, by taking hold of specific Trusts, one by one, and setting them--all mankind looking on--in the nation"s vision, setting them even in their own vision--taking the Trusts that thought they had got what they wanted, making them stand up and look (in some great public lighted place) at what pathetic, tragical failures they are, letting them see that what their Trust had wanted all along, if it had only thought about it, was not success one went to jail for--success by getting the best out of the most people, but success by serving the most people the best.
A great many of us in America have been exercising our minds for a long time now about the eagerness of the Trusts, and the trouble we were going to have in curbing the eagerness of the Trusts.
Sometimes I have wondered if, after all, it was our minds we were exercising, for when one sits down seriously to think of it, it is the eagerness of the Trusts that is the most hopeful thing about them.
What is the matter with our American Trusts, perhaps, is not and never has been, their eagerness, but their eagerness for things that they did not want, and for things that almost everybody is coming to see that they did not want.
The moment that the eagerness of our American Trusts is an eagerness for things that they really want, the Trusts will be seen piling over each other"s heels, asking the government to please investigate them. The more they can get the people to know about them and about their eagerness, the more the people will trust them and deal with them.
All that we have been waiting for is a government that sees the part from the point of view of the whole, which will take up a few specific Trusts and be specific enough with them to make them think, think hard what they really want, and what their real eagerness is about, and the entire face of modern business will change. First the expression will change and then the face itself.
The moment it is found that the government is a specific government, all the trusts that know what they really want and know what they really are doing, will want to be investigated, because they will want everybody to know that they know. In case of the trusts that do not know what they want and that do not know what they are doing, the government will just step in, of course, and investigate them until they find out.
A specific government will not need to be specific many times.
It takes up a particular Trust in its hand, turns it over quietly, empties its contents out before the people and says to everybody, "This particular Trust you see here has tried to be a kind of Trust, which it found out afterward, it did not want to be. It is the kind of Trust whose officers hide their faces when they think of what it was that they thought that they thought that they wanted....
"These men you see here, forty silent nations looking on, hundreds and thousands of self-respecting, self-supporting, public-serving, creative, successful business men, whom all the world envies looking on, do hereby beg to declare to all business men who know them and to the people, that they did not ever really want these things for themselves that their business says or seems to say they wanted.
"They wish to ask the public to put themselves in their places and to refuse to believe that they deliberately sat down, seriously thought it all out, that they had planned to express to everybody what their natures really were in a blind, brutal, foolish business like this which we have just been showing you. They beg to have it believed that their business misrepresents them, that it misrepresents what they want, and they ask to be again admitted to the good-will, the hope and forgiveness, the companionship of a great people.
"They declare" (the government will go on) "that they are not the men they seem. They are merely men in a hurry. They want it understood that they have merely hurried so fast and hurried so long that they now wake up at last only to see, see with this terrific plainness what it really is that has been happening to them all their lives, _viz._: for forty, fifty, or sixty years they have merely forgot who they were and overlooked what they were like.
"In hurrying, too, it is only fair to say they have had to use machines to hurry with and unconsciously, year by year, a.s.sociating almost exclusively with machines, their machines (pump handles, trip-hammers, hydraulic drills, steam shovels and cranes and cash registers) have grown into them.
"This is the way it has happened. "Let the nation be merciful to them,"
the government will then say, and dismiss the subject."