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Page 44
Men living near to the masses of voters, and knowing them intimately,
recognize this and act upon it; they minister directly to life and to
social needs. They realize that the people as a whole are clamoring for
social results, and they hold their power because they respond to that
demand. They are corrupt and often do their work badly; but they at
least avoid the mistake of a certain type of business men who are
frightened by democracy, and have lost their faith in the people. The
two standards are similar to those seen at a popular exhibition of
pictures where the cultivated people care most for the technique of a
given painting, the moving mass for a subject that shall be domestic and
human.
This difference may be illustrated by the writer's experience in a
certain ward of Chicago, during three campaigns, when efforts were made
to dislodge an alderman who had represented the ward for many years. In
this ward there are gathered together fifty thousand people,
representing a score of nationalities; the newly emigrated Latin,
Teuton, Celt, Greek, and Slav who live there have little in common save
the basic experiences which come to men in all countries and under all
conditions. In order to make fifty thousand people, so heterogeneous in
nationality, religion, and customs, agree upon any demand, it must be
founded upon universal experiences which are perforce individual and not
social.
An instinctive recognition of this on the part of the alderman makes it
possible to understand the individualistic basis of his political
success, but it remains extremely difficult to ascertain the reasons for
the extreme leniency of judgment concerning the political corruption of
which he is constantly guilty.
This leniency is only to be explained on the ground that his
constituents greatly admire individual virtues, and that they are at the
same time unable to perceive social outrages which the alderman may be
committing. They thus free the alderman from blame because his
corruption is social, and they honestly admire him as a great man and
hero, because his individual acts are on the whole kindly and generous.
In certain stages of moral evolution, a man is incapable of action
unless the results will benefit himself or some one of his
acquaintances, and it is a long step in moral progress to set the good
of the many before the interest of the few, and to be concerned for the
welfare of a community without hope of an individual return. How far the
selfish politician befools his constituents into believing that their
interests are identical with his own; how far he presumes upon their
inability to distinguish between the individual and social virtues, an
inability which he himself shares with them; and how far he dazzles them
by the sense of his greatness, and a conviction that they participate
therein, it is difficult to determine.
Morality certainly develops far earlier in the form of moral fact than
in the form of moral ideas, and it is obvious that ideas only operate
upon the popular mind through will and character, and must be dramatized
before they reach the mass of men, even as the biography of the saints
have been after all "the main guide to the stumbling feet of thousands
of Christians to whom the Credo has been but mysterious words."
Ethics as well as political opinions may be discussed and disseminated
among the sophisticated by lectures and printed pages, but to the common
people they can only come through example--through a personality which
seizes the popular imagination. The advantage of an unsophisticated
neighborhood is, that the inhabitants do not keep their ideas as
treasures--they are untouched by the notion of accumulating them, as
they might knowledge or money, and they frankly act upon those they
have. The personal example promptly rouses to emulation. In a
neighborhood where political standards are plastic and undeveloped, and
where there has been little previous experience in self-government, the
office-holder himself sets the standard, and the ideas that cluster
around him exercise a specific and permanent influence upon the
political morality of his constituents.
Nothing is more certain than that the quality which a heterogeneous
population, living in one of the less sophisticated wards, most admires
is the quality of simple goodness; that the man who attracts them is the
one whom they believe to be a good man. We all know that children long
"to be good" with an intensity which they give to no other ambition. We
can all remember that the earliest strivings of our childhood were in
this direction, and that we venerated grown people because they had
attained perfection.
Primitive people, such as the South Italian peasants, are still in this
stage. They want to be good, and deep down in their hearts they admire
nothing so much as the good man. Abstract virtues are too difficult for
their untrained minds to apprehend, and many of them are still simple
enough to believe that power and wealth come only to good people.
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