Chapter II: Part 2

Just because she is more important in the home than the father I wish to speak especially to the women on one point in connection with bringing up children. One of the things that makes one sad in certain families is to see the harm done by the loving parent who is foolish. I trust that I need not say that I abhor and condemn the father and the mother who do not give ample and manifest love to the children. It is a dreadful thing to have a child brought up in a loveless home; it is a dreadful thing to have the children who are brought into the world deprived of the love and the devotion which is their due. But great though the harm is that is done by the hard, narrow, unsympathetic parent, it is hardly greater than the harm done by the well-meaning parent--and I regret to say more often by the woman than the man--the well-meaning parent who permits tenderness of heart to extend until it becomes softness of head. Too often, among hard-working friends of mine I have known a woman say, “I’ve had to work hard all my life and my daughter shall be brought up as a lady”; meaning--poor soul--that the daughter shall be brought up to be utterly worthless to herself and to everyone else. I have often seen a good woman--at least a woman who was good in purpose--allow her children to become utterly selfish, and really elaborately trained for avoiding the performance of duty, under the mistaken impression that she was being kind and loving to them. The worst wrong that can be committed by you mothers and fathers to your children is to train them in such fashion that they have no recognition of duty to themselves or to others. Your children had better have been taken away from you and adopted somewhere else than brought up by you if you are guilty of the culpable weakness of gratifying your own feeling of weak, ease-loving affection by failing to make them behave from the beginning as they ought to behave.

I am speaking of what I have seen in humble households. I have seen it in aggravated degree in bigger households; but, just as I told you yesterday, I am not concerned very much with the multi-millionaire excepting as we are foolish enough to allow ourselves to be hurt by anything that is wrong in his example. I meet just as large a proportion of good people among multi-millionaires as among others; but anything merely affecting them is a small question. I am not dealing with them. If they all went wrong, and the rest of the American people went right, the nation would still be all right.

The man in whom I am primarily interested, the woman in whom I am most interested, is the average man and the average woman, the American whom we see about us running the trolley-cars, running the steam-cars, running every small business, taking care of the small houses, doing all the ordinary things around about us. It is for and to them that I am speaking.

If the mother teaches the girl that when she comes home she is to sit in the front parlor at ease and let the mother work in the kitchen and run up and down stairs until at the end of the day she is utterly worn out, she not only wrongs herself--that I am not concerned about, for she is too foolish to have me care very much about her--but, what I am concerned about, she inflicts a dreadful wrong on the daughter and upon all with whom the daughter is afterwards to be brought into contact. If the girl trained in such a way is a fundamentally good girl she will finally unlearn the lesson she was taught at home; but it will cost her years of effort to unlearn the lesson; and if she is of weak character she will have been permanently spoiled.

And in just the same way with the father--and here I am going to say a word especially to the father who is pretty well off in this world’s goods. If the father brings up the boy in such fashion that he cannot do anything except spend money in vacuous fashion he has not helped the boy, he has hurt him. It would have been better for the boy that the father had never earned money at all than to have earned money if his training is to be in such fashion. Of course, you fathers, it is a great error to think that it is necessary to show needless harshness to your sons. I have no patience with that type of twisted Puritanism which forbids the father to show love and affection and consideration for his son. You do not make the boy hardier or better by making him miserable; you do not tend to make him a good citizen by giving him a feeling of sore dislike for his parent. Make him your companion, make him your friend; do all you can for him; and then make him understand that in his turn he must do all he can for you and for the rest of the family. Make it a reciprocal bond between you. But never whether from carelessness or folly let him grow up thinking that it is proper for him to lead a useless or idle life or one of mere pleasure. We have room in this country for a busy leisure class but we have no room for an idle class, I don’t care at which end of the social scale, whether of a hobo or a multi-millionaire.

And one more word to the mother. I have spoken of the mother’s training of the daughter. Perhaps it is even worse if the mother permits the son to grow up selfish and without regard for the feeling of others. I remember a good many years ago reading a little story that impressed me much. It described a tired, rather wornout mother getting into a railroad train with her boy. The mother sat by the window in the seat; the minute the little boy discovered that he was not by the window he began “mother, I want to sit by the window”; she replied “mother is tired”; then he, “mother, I want to sit by the window”; she answered “now, Johnnie, you wouldn’t ask to sit by the window when poor mother is so tired”; he, pouting and sullen “I want to sit by the window”; she, patiently “Johnnie, I want to look out of the window, I am very tired, I want to rest”; he, louder and more angry, “I want to sit by the window”; whereupon at last the mother let him sit by the window! The author of the story went on to say that sometime in the future a sad little wife would wonder “why men were so inconsiderate”; and that the blame would rest really as much with Johnnie’s unwise mother as with himself. Of course, what the Johnnie of that type needs is a firm parental hand. Let him have discipline in as ample a measure as love.

I remember a most excellent backwoods mother whom I once knew who, having disciplined a boy who sadly needed it, was addressed by a rather sentimental lady of my acquaintance as follows: “Oh, my dear Mrs. So and So, I am sure it hurt you worse than it did him”! To which my backwoods friend responded, “indeed it did not, he had been very bad; and I thoroughly enjoyed it”!

So my plea today is for that form of applied ethics which lies at the base of every kind of good citizenship. We cannot have good citizenship in the present unless the average man and the average woman do their duty in their homes; we cannot have good citizenship in the future unless in the average home the average boy and girl are so brought up that in the future they will be American men and women of the right type, able and anxious to meet all the exacting demands that American citizenship now makes, and that it will make in ever increasing degree upon our people as the generations pass.

THE BIBLE AND THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE

I have come here to-day, in the course of a series of lectures upon applied ethics, upon realizable ideals, to speak of the book to which our people owe infinitely the greater part of their store of ethics, infinitely the greater part of their knowledge of how to apply that store to the needs of our every-day life.

There have been many collections of the sacred books, the sacred writings of the Old and New Testaments--many collections of note. Upon an occasion such as this we who think most of all of the King James version of the Bible should be the first to acknowledge our obligation to many of the other versions, especially to the earliest of the great versions, the Vulgate of St. Jerome, a very great version, a version that played an incalculable part in the development of Western Europe, because it put the Bible into the common language of Western Europe, the language known to every man who pretended to any degree of learning--Latin--and therefore gave the Bible to the peoples of the West at a time when the old classic civilization of Greece and Rome had first crumbled to rottenness and had then been overwhelmed by the barbarian sea. In the wreck of the old world, Christianity was all that the survivors had to cling to; and the Latin version of the Bible put it at their disposal.

Other versions of the Bible followed from time to time, and gradually men began to put them into the vernaculars of the different countries. Wyclif’s Bible is one version to which we must feel under deep obligation. But the great debt of the English-speaking peoples everywhere is to the translation of the Bible that we all know--I trust I can say, all here know--in our own homes, the Bible as it was put forth in English three centuries ago. No other book of any kind ever written in English--perhaps no other book ever written in any other tongue--has ever so affected the whole life of a people as this authorized version of the Scriptures has affected the life of the English-speaking peoples.

I enter a most earnest plea that in our hurried and rather bustling life of to-day we do not lose the hold that our forefathers had on the Bible. I wish to see Bible study as much a matter of course in the secular college as in the seminary. No educated man can afford to be ignorant of the Bible; and no uneducated man can afford to be ignorant of the Bible. Occasional critics, taking sections of the Old Testament, are able to point out that the teachings therein are not in accordance with our own convictions and views of morality, and they ignore the prime truth that these deeds recorded in the Old Testament are not in accordance with our theories of morality because of the very fact that these theories are based upon the New Testament, because the New Testament represents not only in one sense the fulfillment of the Old but in another sense the substitution of the New Testament for the Old in certain vital points of ethics. If critics of this kind would study the morality inculcated by the Old Testament among the chosen people, and compare it, not with the morality of to-day, not with the morality created by the New Testament, but with the morality of the surrounding nations of antiquity, who had no Bible, they would appreciate the enormous advances that the Old Testament even in its most primitive form worked for the Jewish people. The Old Testament did not carry Israel as far as the New Testament has carried us; but it advanced Israel far beyond the point any neighboring nation had then reached.

In studying the writings of the average critic who has assailed the Bible the most salient point is usually his peculiar shallowness in failing to understand, not merely the lofty ethical teachings of the Bible as we now know it, but the elemental fact that even the most primitive ethical system taught in the primitive portions of the Bible, the earliest of the sacred writings, marks a giant stride in moral advance when compared with the contemporary ethical conceptions of the other peoples of the day.

Moreover, I appeal for a study of the Bible on many different accounts, even aside from its ethical and moral teachings, even aside from the fact that all serious people, all men who think deeply, even among non-Christians, have come to agree that the life of Christ, as set forth in the four Gospels, represents an infinitely higher and purer morality than is preached in any other book of the world. Aside from this, I ask that the Bible be studied for the sake of the breadth it must give to every man who studies it. I cannot understand the mental attitude of those who would put the Bible to one side as not being a book of interest to grown men. What could interest men who find the Bible dull? The Sunday newspaper? Think of the difference there must be in the mental make-up of the man whose chief reading includes the one, as compared with the man whose chief reading is represented by the other--the vulgarity, the shallowness, the inability to keep the mind fixed on any serious subject, which is implied in the mind of any man who cannot read the Bible and yet can take pleasure in reading only literature of the type of the colored supplement of the Sunday paper. Now, I am not speaking against the colored supplement of any paper in its place; but as a substitute for serious reading of the great Book, it represents a type of mind which it is gross flattery merely to call shallow.

I do not ask you to accept the word of those who preach the Bible as an inspired book; I make my appeal not only to professing Christians; I make it to every man who seeks after a high and useful life, to every man who seeks the inspiration of religion, or who endeavors to make his life conform to a high ethical standard; to every man who, be he Jew or Gentile, whatever his form of religious belief, whatever creed he may profess, faces life with the real desire not only to get out of it what is best, but to do his part in everything that tells for the ennobling and uplifting of humanity.

I am making a plea, not only for the training of the mind, but for the moral and spiritual training of the home and the church, the moral and spiritual training that has always been found in, and has ever accompanied, the study of the book which in almost every civilized tongue, and in many an uncivilized, can be described as “the Book” with the certainty of having the description understood by all listeners. A year and a quarter ago I was passing on foot through the native kingdom of Uganda, in Central Africa. Uganda is the most highly developed of the pure Negro states in Africa. It is the state which has given the richest return for missionary labor. It now contains some half-million of Christians, the direction of the government being in the hands of those Christians. I was interested to find that in their victorious fight against, in the first place, heathendom, and, in the next place, Moslemism, the native Christians belonging to the several different sects, both Catholics and Protestants, had taken as their symbol “the Book,” sinking all minor differences among themselves, and coming together on the common ground of their common belief in “the Book” that was the most precious gift the white man had brought to them.

It is of that book, and as testimony to its incalculable influence for good from the educational and moral standpoint, that the great scientist Huxley wrote in the following words:

“Consider the great historical fact that for three centuries this book has been woven into the life of all that is noblest and best in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain; that it is written in the noblest and purest English and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind, who never left his village, to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilizations of a great past stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between the Eternities?”

I ask your attention to this when I plead for the training of children in the Bible. I am quoting, not a professed Christian, but a scientific man whose scientific judgment is thus expressed as to the value of Biblical training for the young.

And again listen to what Huxley says as to the bearing of the Bible upon those who study the ills of our time with the hope of eventually remedying them:

“The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed. Down to modern times no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken into account, in which the duties so much more than the privileges of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that the welfare of the State in the long run depends upon the righteousness of the citizen so strongly laid down.... The Bible is the most democratic book in the world.”

This is the judgment of Huxley, one of the greatest scientific thinkers of the last century. I ask you to train children in the Bible. Never commit the awful error of training the child by making him learn verses of the Bible as a punishment. I remember once calling upon a very good woman and finding one of her small sons, with a face of black injury, studying the Bible, and this very good woman said to me with pride, “Johnny has been bad, and he is learning a chapter of Isaiah by heart.” I could not refrain from saying, “My dear madam, how can you do such a dreadful thing as to make the unfortunate Johnny associate for the rest of his life the noble and beautiful poetry and prophecy of Isaiah with an excessively disagreeable task? You are committing a greater wrong against him than any he has himself committed.” Punish the children in any other way that is necessary; but do not make them look upon the Bible with suspicion and dislike as an instrument of torture, so that they feel that it is a pain to have to read it, instead of, as it ought to be, a privilege and pleasure to read it.

In reading the Bible and the beautiful Bible stories that have delighted childhood for so many generations, my own preference is to read them from the Bible and not as explained even in otherwise perfectly nice little books. Read these majestic and simple stories with whatever explanation is necessary to make the child understand the words; and then the story he will understand without difficulty.

Of course we must not forget to give whatever explanation is necessary to enable the child to understand the words. I think every father and mother comes to realize how queerly the little brains will accept new words at times. I remember an incident of the kind in connection with a clergyman to whose church I went when a very small boy. It was a big Presbyterian church in Madison Square, New York; any New Yorker of my age who happens to be present here will probably recollect the church. We had a clergyman one of the finest men that I had ever met, one of the very, very rare men to whom it would be no misuse of words to describe as saintly. He was very fond of one of his little grandsons. This little grandson showed an entire willingness to come to church and to Sunday-school when there were plenty of people present; but it was discovered that he was most reluctant to go anywhere near the church when there were not people there. As often happens with a child (every mother knows how difficult it often is to find out just what the little mind is thinking), his parents could not find out for some time what was the matter with the little boy or what he was afraid of in the church. Finally, Dr. Adams, the clergyman, started down to the church and asked his little grandson to come with him. After a little hesitation the small boy said yes, if his grandfather were coming, he would go. They got inside the church and walked down the aisle, their footsteps echoing in the empty church. The little fellow trotted alongside his grandfather, looking with half-frightened eagerness on every side. Soon he said, “Grandfather, where is the Zeal?” The grandfather, much puzzled, responded, “Where is what?” “Where is the Zeal?” repeated the little boy. The grandfather said, “I don’t know what you mean; what are you talking of?” “Why, grandfather, don’t you know? ‘The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up’!” Now that little fellow had been rendered profoundly uncomfortable and very suspicious of the church because he had read this statement, had accepted it in literal fashion, and concluded there was some kind of fearful beast dwelling in the church, as to which it behooved him to be on his guard.

It would be a great misfortune for our people if they ever lost the Bible as one of their habitual standards and guides in morality. In addressing this body, which must contain representatives of many different creeds, I ask you men and women to treat the Bible in the only way in which it can be treated if benefit is to be obtained from it, and that is, as a guide to conduct. I make no pretense to speak to you on dogmatic theology--there are probably scores of different views of dogma here represented. There are scores of different ways leading toward the same goal; but there is one test which we have a right to apply to the professors of all the creeds--the test of conduct. More and more, people who possess either religious belief or aspiration after religious belief are growing to demand conduct as the ultimate test of the worth of the belief. I hope that after what I have said no man can suspect me of failure rightly to estimate the enormous influence that study of the Bible should have on our lives; but I would rather not see a man study it at all than have him read it as a fetish on Sunday and disregard its teachings on all other days of the week; because, evil though we think the conduct of the man who disregards its teachings on week days, it is still worse if that conduct is tainted with the mean vice of hypocrisy. The measure of our respect for and belief in the man and the woman who do try to shape their lives by the highest ethical standards inculcated in the Scriptures must in large part be also the measure of our contempt for those who ostentatiously read the Bible and then disregard its teachings in their dealings with their fellow-men.

I do not like the thief, big or little; I do not like him in business and I do not like him in politics; but I dislike him most when, to shield himself from the effects of his wrong-doing, he claims that, after all, he is a “religious man.” He is not a religious man, save in the sense that the Pharisee was a religious man in the time of the Saviour. The man who advances the fact that he goes to church and reads the Bible, as an offset to the fact that he has acted like a scoundrel in his public or private relations, only writes his own condemnation in larger letters than before. And so a man or a woman who reads and quotes the Bible as a warrant and an excuse for hardheartedness and uncharitableness and lack of mercy to friend or neighbor is reading and quoting the Bible to his or her own damage, perhaps to his or her own destruction. Let the man who goes to church, who reads the Bible, feel that it is peculiarly incumbent upon him so to lead his life in the face of the world that no discredit shall be brought upon the creed he professes, that no discredit shall attach to the book in accordance with which he asserts that he leads his own life. Sometimes I have seen--all of you have seen--the appeal made to stand by a man who has done evil, on the ground that he is a pillar of the church. Such a man is a rotten pillar of any church. And the professors of any creed, the men belonging to any church, should be more jealous than any outsider in holding such a man to account, in demanding that his practice shall square with the high professions of belief. Such a man sins not only against the moral law, sins not only against the community as a whole, but sins, above all, against his own church, against all who profess religion, against all who belong to churches, because he by his life gives point to the sneer of the cynic who disbelieves in all application of Christian ethics to life, and who tries to make the ordinary man distrust church people as hypocrites. Whenever any church member is guilty of business dishonesty or political dishonesty or offenses against the moral law in any way, those who are members of churches should feel a far greater regret and disappointment than those who are not members. They cannot afford for one moment to let it be supposed that they exact from the attenders at church any less strict observance of the moral law than if they did not attend church. They cannot afford to let the outside world even for a moment think that they accept church-going and Bible-readers as substitutes for, instead of incitements toward, leading a higher and better and more useful life. We must strive each of us so to conduct our own lives as to be, to a certain extent at least, our brother’s keeper. We must show that we actually do take into our own souls the teachings that we read; that we apply to ourselves the Gospel teaching that a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit, and that the sound tree must prove its soundness by the fruit it brings forth; that we apply to ourselves the teachings of the epistle wherein we are warned to be doers of the word and not hearers only.

I have asked you to read the Bible for the beautiful English and for the history it teaches, as well as for the grasp it gives you upon the proper purpose of mankind. Of course if you read it only for aesthetic purposes, if you read it without thought of following its ethical teachings, then you are apt to do but little good to your fellow-men; for if you regard the reading of it as an intellectual diversion only, and, above all, if you regard this reading simply as an outward token of Sunday respectability, small will be the good that you yourself get from it. Our success in striving to help our fellow-men, and therefore to help ourselves, depends largely upon our success as we strive, with whatever shortcomings, with whatever failures, to lead our lives in accordance with the great ethical principles laid down in the life of Christ, and in the New Testament writings which seek to expound and apply his teachings.

THE PUBLIC SERVANT AND THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT

I am overcome more and more with your good nature in coming here. I learn a great deal more from you than you can possibly learn from me.

Today I come to speak on the text “The Public Servant and the Eighth Commandment” and like some other preachers I do not intend to keep purely to that text. I chose the two titles I speak upon today and tomorrow because I wish to lay especial stress upon the prime virtue of the public servant and therefore the prime crime of the unworthy public servant; and also upon the prime virtue and the corresponding prime crime of the man who writes about the public servant, the man of the newspaper press and magazines. With the latter I shall deal tomorrow. Today I wish to speak of the public servant. Because the first essential in a public man is honesty, I have chosen as my title the public servant and the eighth commandment; but I wish to speak of much more than the eighth commandment in connection with the public servant, and I wish to speak of the attitude of the public as well as of the attitude of its servant.

There used to be in the army an old proverb that there were no bad regiments, but plenty of bad colonels. So in private life I have grown to believe that if you always find bad servants in a household you want to look out for the mistress. I wonder if you grasp just what I mean by that? If you always find bad public servants, look out for the public! We here--you my hearers and I--live in a government where we are the people and in consequence where we are not to be excused if the government goes wrong. There are many countries where the government can be very wrong indeed and where nevertheless it can be said that the people are fundamentally right, for they don’t choose their public servants, they don’t choose their government. On the contrary we do choose our government, not temporarily but permanently, and in the long run our public servants must necessarily be what we choose to have them. They represent us; they must represent our self-restraint and sense of decency and common sense, or else, our folly, our wickedness, or at least our supine indifference in letting others do the work of government for us. Not only should we have the right type of public servants, but we should remember that the wrong type discredits not only the man himself but each of us whose servant he is. Sometimes I hear our countrymen inveigh against politicians; I hear our countrymen abroad saying, “Oh, you mustn’t judge us by our politicians.” I always want to interrupt and answer, “you must judge us by our politicians.” We pretend to be the masters--we, the people--and if we permit ourselves to be ill served, to be served by corrupt and incompetent and inefficient men, then on our own heads must the blame rest.

The other day I spoke to you of the prime need of having each man act the good citizen first in his own home, and I added that unless he did, he could not be a good citizen. But that is not enough. In addition the man must do his part, not merely in the election of candidates, but in creating the kind of atmosphere which will make the public man unwilling to do wrong, and especially unwilling to permit wrong in its grosser forms.

I began my education early, immediately after leaving college; for about that time I first began to spend a good deal of my time west of the Mississippi, and I also went into the New York legislature, a by no means wholly arcadian body. It is a little difficult to persuade me that politically we are growing worse. I do not think so. I think that politically we have grown a little better during the thirty years that I have watched politics close at hand. We have slipped back, now and then, we have had trouble of every kind--local disturbances--yet on the whole I believe we have grown better and not worse; but there is still ample room for improvement!

One of the first things that struck me in the legislature was the amount of downright corruption that I saw and the utter cynicism with which many of the men who practiced the corruption spoke of it. The next thing that struck me, as I grew better acquainted with political conditions, was the difficulty in arousing the public to an attitude of hostility towards that corruption. This was largely because the public declined to be awakened unless they thought the corruption was directly exercised at their own expense; in other words, it availed little to go into a district and say “look at that man’s votes on such and such questions, they show that he isn’t a straight man,” unless the people of the district believed that their own interest was involved in one of the questions upon which the man had voted wrong. For instance, there were in the legislature at that time many country members who were scrupulous to do right, or at least to appear to do right, on the smallest questions affecting their own districts, but who would go very far wrong indeed when the question was one involving some interest in New York City; for they trusted to the fact that their people did not care how they voted on New York City matters as long as they kept straight on matters immediately affecting the constituents themselves. Naturally men who held such a standard were certain when they got into higher offices to be false to their trust. You cannot have unilateral honesty. The minute that a man is dishonest along certain lines, even though he pretends to be honest along other lines, you can be sure that it is only a pretense, it is only expediency; and you cannot trust to the mere sense of expediency to hold a man straight under heavy pressure. I very early made up my mind that it was a detriment to the public to have in public life any man whose attitude was merely that he would be as honest as the law made it necessary for him to be. The kind of honesty which essentially consists merely in too great acuteness to get into jail is a mighty poor type of honesty upon which to rely; because, up near the border line between what can and what can not be punished by law, there come many occasions when the man can defile the public service, can defy the public conscience, can in spirit be false to his oath, and yet technically keep his skirts clear. When I say that the prime need is that the public servant shall obey the eighth commandment I do not mean merely that he shall keep himself in such shape that a clever lawyer can get him off if he is charged with theft. I mean that he shall be honest intensively and extensively. I mean that he shall act with the same fine sense of honor toward the public and on behalf of the public that we expect to be shown by those neighbors with whom we are willing to trust not only our money, but our good names. If you intend to trust a neighbor, the kind of neighbor whom you certainly will not choose is the man of whom it can only be said that you are quite sure you won’t be able to get him in jail. The kind of mental acuteness that is shown merely by a thorough study of the best methods of escaping successful criminal procedure is not the kind of mental acuteness that you value in your friend, in the man with whom you have business relations; and it should be the last type of mental ability, the last type of moral attitude, which you tolerate in a public man.

Perhaps the most dangerous of all public servants, however, is the public servant who gets into office by persuading a section of the public that he will do something that is just a little bit crooked in their interest. I do not care in the least what section of the public is thus persuaded. I do not care whether it is the great corporation man who wishes to see a given individual made judge, or executive officer, or legislator, “because he is our man and he will look out for the rights of property,” or whether, on the other hand, it is the wage-worker, the laboring man, who supports some candidate because that candidate announces that he is “the friend of labor,” although the man to whom the appeal is made ought to understand also that the candidate is the foe of decency. Capitalist and wage-worker alike will do well to remember that their interests face to face with the public man are primarily as those affecting all good American citizens, and that whatever the temporary advantage may be, they irretrievably harm themselves and the children who are to come after them if they permit themselves to be drawn into any other attitude.

The capitalist who because he thinks it is the interest of his class to have in high office a corrupt man who will serve his class interest is laying up for himself and for his children a day of terrible retribution; for if that type of capitalist has his way long enough he will persuade the whole community that the interest of the community is bound up in overthrowing every man in public office who serves property, even though he serves it honestly. The corrupt capitalist may help himself for the moment, and he may be defended by others of his own class on grounds of expediency; but in the end he works fearful damage to his fellows. If a business man cannot run a given business except by bribing or by submitting to blackmail let him get out of it and into some other business. If he cannot run his business save on condition of doing things which can only be done in the darkness, then let him enter into some totally different field of activity. The test is easy. Let him ask whether he is afraid anything will be found out or not. If he is not, he is all right; if he is, he is all wrong. So much for the capitalist.

Let the wage-worker in his turn remember that the candidate for public office who appeals for his support upon the ground that he will condone lawless violence, that he will look the other way when violence is perpetrated, that he will recognize the rules of a labor organization of any kind as standing above the Constitution and the laws of his country, let the laboring man remember that if he supports such a candidate he in his turn is doing his best to bring about a condition of things where democracy would come to an end, where self-rule would come to an end. Let the capitalist remember that he had better be most shocked at the deeds of his own class, and not at the misdeeds of the men of another class. And let the laboring man remember in his turn that the foe against whom he should most carefully guard is the corrupt labor man, the labor candidate who preaches violence, envy, class hatred. That is the kind of man who most jeopards the welfare of the wageworker, just as the successful corruptionist, the capitalist who has reached a high position in the financial world by the practice of acts that will not bear the light of day, is really the worst foe of the very property classes that are sometimes so misguided as to rally to his defense when he is attacked.

I shall tell you one story: In the old days I used to have a cow ranch in the short grass country. At that time there were no fences within a thousand miles of it. If a calf was passed by on the roundup so that next year when it was a yearling and was not following any cow it was unbranded, it was called a maverick. It was range custom or range law that if a maverick were found on any range the man finding it would put on the brand of that range. One day I had hired a new cow-puncher, and when he and I were riding we struck a maverick. It was on a neighbor’s range, the Thistle Range. The puncher roped and threw the maverick; we built a little fire of sage-brush, and took out the cinch iron and heated it to run on the brand. When he started to run on the brand I said to him “the Thistle brand”; he answered, “that’s all right, boss, I know my business.” In a minute I said “hold on, you’re putting on my brand”; to which he answered “Yes, I always put on the boss’s brand.” I said “Oh, well, you go back to the house and get your time.” He rose, saying “What’s that for, I was putting on your brand”; and I closed the conversation with the remark “Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for me you will steal from me.” That applies in lots of occupations besides those of the cow punchers. Nowhere does it apply more clearly than in public life.

One of the pains of our development as a people has been the tendency to deify what is called “smartness,” meaning by smartness adroitness and skill unaccompanied by any scruple in connection with the observance of a moral law. We have all of us heard--I have heard it in the West as well as in the East--some man alluded to as an awful scoundrel, and another person replying “Oh yes, perhaps he ain’t quite straight, but I tell you, that fellow is smart!” You must yourselves have heard at times this kind of statement made about some scoundrel whom you could not understand decent men supporting; and the statement is acted upon by many little men, and by many big men, both in business life and in political life. Well, we shall never reach the proper standard in public service or in private conduct until we have a public opinion so aroused, so resolute, so intelligent, that it shall be understood that we are more bitter against the scoundrel that succeeds than against the scoundrel that fails.

The other day I noticed a brief statement made by a certain Senator, which, as far as I have seen, has not been commented on at all, but which struck me as highly significant. The Senator in question had been defending Mr. Lorimer, and in alluding to some of the men who had testified that they had been bribed to vote for the Illinois Senator, he quite casually remarked that in his experience a knave was always a fool. His idea was that no very high grade intelligence was ever found in a knave. The Senator was entirely wrong. The knave that fails is usually a fool, but the knave that succeeds may be a very intelligent man, and his intelligence when unaccompanied by any trace of moral instinct, merely makes him infinitely the most dangerous man that this community can bring forth; and the Senator in the remark he made came dangerously near assuming the very dangerous position that a knave who is sufficiently able is therefore relieved from the odium of knavery.

We ought to admire intelligence and ability; but only when the intelligence and ability are controlled and guided by the will to do right. Intelligence and ability divorced from the moral instinct merely make the man an infinitely dangerous wild beast whom it is our business to hunt out of the political life, and, so far as we can, out of the business life, of the community.

It has been finely said that the supreme task of humanity is to subordinate the whole fabric of civilization to the service of the soul. This does not mean that we are to neglect the things of the body. It means that we are to treat the welfare of the body as necessary, as a good in itself; but still more as a good because upon that welfare we can build the higher welfare of the soul. There is a soul in the community, a soul in the nation, just exactly as there is a soul in the individual; and exactly as the individual hopelessly mars himself if he lets his conscience be dulled by the constant repetition of unworthy acts, so the nation will hopelessly blunt the popular conscience if it permits its public men continually to do acts which the nation in its heart of hearts knows are acts that cast discredit upon our whole public life.

It is an old and a trite saying that our actions have more effect upon our principles than our principles upon our actions. I remember some time ago out on the range listening to a fine old fellow speaking to his nephew who was a fine young man, but nervous in his strange surroundings, and entirely unaccustomed to horses. The young fellow had asked his uncle how he could grow fearless in handling horses, because, he said, he was sure that if he only could get so that he would not be afraid of them he could handle them all right. The old uncle responded, “Now, I’ll tell you, you go ahead and handle them as if you were not afraid of them and gradually you will stop being afraid of them.” In other words, the boy could not afford to wait until he stopped being afraid of the horse before he rode it. He had to ride until he stopped being afraid of it. He had to get the habit of not being afraid of it, and when once he had acquired the habit of riding as if he were not afraid, all cause for worry disappeared and gradually all fear itself disappeared. It is just the same way in public life. If you habitually suffer your public representatives to be dishonest you will gradually lose all power of insisting upon honesty. If you let them continually do little acts that are not quite straight you will gradually induce in their minds the mental attitude which will make it hopeless to get from them anything that is not crooked. If in this state, in California, or in New York, you for a generation permit big corporations to purchase favors to which they are not entitled you will breed up a race of public men and business men who accept that condition of things as normal. And then, my friends, when you finally wake up I wish you would remember that great though their blame may be your blame is even greater for having permitted such a condition of things to arise.

When the awakening comes, you will undoubtedly have to change the machinery of the law in order to meet the conditions that have become so bad, but do not forget that no nation was ever yet saved by governmental machinery alone. You must have the right kind of law; but the best law that the wit of man can devise will amount to nothing if you have not the right kind of spirit in the man behind the law. And again, friends, when you finally revolt, as revolt you will and must against being ruled by corporations, and when you assume the power over them, then is the time to remember that it is your duty to be honest to them just as much as to exact honesty from them; and that if you are guilty of the folly and iniquity of doing wrong at their expense, you have not made a step in advance, even though you have stopped them from doing wrong at your expense. You must demand honesty or you are not men; and you must do honesty or you are not decent men.

Sometimes I have been asked as to why I draw the distinction in need of governmental action between the big business corporation and the smaller corporation. I think it is perfectly clear. Each one of us deals in his domestic relations with a number of different men, the grocer, the dry goods merchant, the carpenter, the butcher, the baker, and a number of others. Now, we do not need any governmental help in dealing with those men, because they are about our size. If the grocer doesn’t give you the proper kind of goods you will change the grocer, and if you don’t pay the grocer he will change you. But if the grocer becomes--I use the technical terminology--a captain of industry and accumulates a great fortune and joins with other men of the same type in a great business--a great railroad, a great oil or coal company, I don’t care what it is--then they create a mighty artificial entity called a corporation, and no one of us individually can deal satisfactorily with that corporation because we are dealing with an entity that is not our size. You can change the grocer if he serves you ill; but if you live along the line of the only railway in the country and wish to ship goods you must ship them on the railway’s terms or not ship them at all. That is the only alternative. If you are dealing with a big corporation that controls all the products of an industry or if you are working for that corporation, you must accept what it gives or accept nothing. The situation is reversed from what it was previously. Therefore it becomes necessary to replace our individual strength by the strength of all of us collectively, so that we may have to represent us an artificial entity as big as the corporation. If the corporation works only inside a state, why then this entity must be the state government; if it works in a number of different states, then we invoke the only man big enough to deal with it--Uncle Sam.

And now how shall Uncle Sam deal with it? Well, fundamentally just exactly as we deal with the grocer and the grocer with us. If we do not pay the grocer enough to give him a profit he will either have to abandon serving us or he will have to get out of business. He cannot run his business unless we pay him enough for him to make money. It is just the same with a big corporation. If we insist upon making stipulations on behalf of the Government, on behalf of the people, such that the corporation cannot carry them out and give any money to those who have built it up, why either that corporation will quit business or at least no other corporation will go into business. On the other hand, if each householder here always pays all his bills without looking into them it does not show that he has a nice disposition, it shows that he is a fool. In the same way I want Uncle Sam to do scrupulous justice to the corporation, but I want him to say in return, now I want you to behave yourself, I have no doubt that you would like to behave yourself; but whether you would or would not, I will see that you do behave yourself.