THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE.[C]
IF one could stand on the edge of the moon and look down through a couple of thousand years on human politics, it would be apparent that everything that happened on the earth was directly dependent on everything else that happened there. Whether the Italian peasant shall eat salt with his bread, depends upon Bismarck. Whether the prison system of Russia shall be improved, depends upon the ministry of Great Britain. If Lord Beaconsfield is in power, there is no leisure in Russia for domestic reform. The lash is everywhere lifted in a security furnished by the concurrence of all the influences upon the globe that favor coercion. In like manner, the good things that happen are each the product of all extant conditions. Constitutional government in England qualifies the whole of western Europe. Our slaves were not set free without the assistance of every liberal mind in Europe; and the thoughts which we think in our closet affect the fate of the Boer in South Africa. That Tolstoy is to-day living unmolested upon his farm instead of serving in a Siberian mine, that Dreyfus is alive and not dead, is due directly to the people in this audience and to others like them scattered over Europe and America.
The effect of enlightenment on tyranny is not merely to make the tyrant afraid to be cruel, it makes him not want to be cruel. It makes him see what cruelty is. And reciprocally the effect of cruelty on enlightenment is to make that enlightenment grow dim. It prevents men from seeing what cruelty is.
The Czar of Russia cannot get rid of your influence, nor you of his. Every ukase he signs makes allowance for you, and, on the other hand, the whole philosophy of your life is tinged by him. You believe that the abuses under the Russian government are inscrutably different from and worse than our own; whereas both sets of atrocities are identical in principle, and are more alike in fact, in taste and smell and substance than your prejudice is willing to admit. The existence of Russia narrows America’s philosophy, and misconduct by a European power may be seen reflected in the moral tone of your clergyman on the following day. More Americans have abandoned their faith in free government since England began to play the tyrant in South Africa than there were colonists in the country in 1776.
Europe is all one family, and speaks, one might say, the same language. The life that has been transplanted to North America during the last three centuries, is European life. From your position on the moon you would not be able to understand what the supposed differences were between European and American things, that the Americans make so much fuss over. You would say, “I see only one people, splashed over different continents. The problems they talk about, the houses they live in, the clothes they wear, seem much alike. Their education and catchwords are identical. They are the children of the Classics, of Christianity, and of the Revival of Learning. They are homogeneous, and they are growing more homogeneous.”
The subtle influences that modern nations exert over one another illustrate the unity of life on the globe. But if we turn to ancient history we find in its bare outlines staggering proof of the interdependence of nations. The Greeks were wiped out. They could not escape their contemporaries any more than we can escape the existence of the Malays. Israel could not escape Assyria, nor Assyria Persia, nor Persia Macedonia, nor Macedonia Rome, nor Rome the Goths. Life is not a boarding-school where a bad boy can be dismissed for the benefit of the rest. He remains. He must be dealt with. He is as much here as we are ourselves. The whole of Europe and Asia and South America and every Malay and every Chinaman, Hindoo, Tartar, and Tagal—of such is our civilization.
Let us for the moment put aside every dictate of religion and political philosophy. Let us discard all prejudice and all love. Let us regard nothing except facts. Does not the coldest conclusion of science announce the fact that the world is peopled, and that every individual of that population has an influence as certain and far more discoverable than the influence of the weight of his body upon the solar system?
A Chinaman lands in San Francisco. The Constitution of the United States begins to rock and tremble. What shall we do with him? The deepest minds of the past must be ransacked to the bottom to find an answer. Every one of seventy million Americans must pass through a throe of thought that leaves him a modified man. The same thing is true when the American lands in China. These creatures have thus begun to think of each other. It is unimaginable that they should not hereafter incessantly and never-endingly continue to think of each other. And out of their thoughts grows the destiny of mankind.
We have an inherited and stupid notion that the East does not change. If Japan goes through a transformation scene under our eyes, we still hold to our prejudice as to the immutability of the Chinese. If our own people and the European nations seem to be meeting and surging and reappearing in unaccustomed rôles every ten years, till modern history looks like a fancy ball, we still go on muttering some old ignorant shibboleth about East and West, Magna Charta, the Indian Mutiny, and Mahomet. The chances are that England will be dead-letter, and Russia progressive before we have done talking. Of a truth, when we consider the rapidity of visible change and the amplitude of time—for there is plenty of time—we need not despair of progress.
The true starting-point for the world’s progress will never be reached by any nation as a whole. It exists and has been reached in the past as it will in the future by individuals scattered here and there in every nation. It is reached by those minds which insist on seeing conditions as they are, and which cannot confine their thoughts to their own kitchen, or to their own creed, or to their own nation. You will think I have in mind poets and philosophers, for these men take humanity as their subject, and deal in the general stuff of human nature. But the narrow spirit in which they often do this cuts down their influence to parish limits. I mean rather those men who in private life act out their thoughts and feelings as to the unity of human life; those same thoughts which the poets and philosophers have expressed in their plays, their sayings, and their visions. There have always been men who in their daily life have fulfilled those intimations and instincts which, if reduced to a statement, receive the names of poetry and religion. These men are the cart-horses of progress, they devote their lives to doing things which can only be justified or explained by the highest philosophy. They proceed as if all men were their brothers. These practical philanthropists go plodding on through each century and leave the bones of their character mingled with the soil of their civilization.
See how large the labors of such men look when seen in historic perspective. They have changed the world’s public opinion. They have moulded the world’s institutions into forms expressive of their will. I ask your attention to one of their achievements. We have one province of conduct in which the visions of the poets have been reduced to practice—yes, erected into a department of government—through the labors of the philanthropists. They have established the hospital and the reformatory; and these visible bastions of philosophy hold now a more unchallenged place in our civilization than the Sermon on the Mount on which they comment.
The truth which the philanthropists of all ages have felt is that the human family was a unit; and this truth, being as deep as human nature, can be expressed in every philosophy—even in the inverted utilitarianism now in vogue. The problem of how to treat insane people and criminals has been solved to this extent, that everyone agrees that nothing must be done to them which injures the survivors. That is the reason we do not kill them. It is unpleasant to have them about, and this unpleasantness can be cured only by our devotion to them. We must either help the wretched or we ourselves become degenerate. They have thus become a positive means of civilizing the modern world; for the instinct of self-preservation has led men to deal with this problem in the only practical way.
Put a Chinaman into your hospital and he will be cared for. You may lie awake at night drawing up reasons for doing something different with this disgusting Chinaman—who, somehow, is in the world and is thrown into your care, your hospital, your thought—but the machinery of your own being is so constructed that if you take any other course with him than that which you take with your own people, your institution will instantly lose its meaning; you would not have the face to beg money for its continuance in the following year. The logic of this, which, if you like, is the logic of self-protection under the illusion of self-sacrifice, is the logic which is at the bottom of all human progress. I dislike to express this idea in its meanest form; but I know there are some professors of political economy here, and I wish to be understood. The utility of hospitals is not to cure the sick. It is to teach mercy. The veneration for hospitals is not accorded to them because they cure the sick, but because they stand for love, and responsibility.
The appeal of physical suffering makes the strongest attack on our common humanity. Even zealots and sectaries are touched. The practice and custom of this kind of mercy have therefore become established, while other kinds of mercy which require more imagination are still in their infancy. But at the bottom of every fight for principle you will find the same sentiment of mercy. If you take a slate and pencil and follow out the precise reasons and consequences of the thing, you will always find that a practical and effective love for mankind is working out a practical self-sacrifice. The average man cannot do the sum, he does not follow the reasoning, but he knows the answer. The deed strikes into his soul with a mathematical impact, and he responds like a tuning-fork when its note is struck.
Everyone knows that self-sacrifice is a virtue. The child takes his nourishment from the tale of heroism as naturally as he takes milk. He feels that the deed was done for his sake. He adopts it: it is his own. The nations have always stolen their myths from one another, and claimed each other’s heroes. It has required all the world’s heroes to make the world’s ear sensitive to new statements, illustrations and applications of the logic of progress. Yet their work has been so well done that all of us respond to the old truths in however new a form. Not France alone but all modern society owes a debt of gratitude to Zola for his rescue of Dreyfus. The whole world would have been degraded and set back, the whole world made less decent and habitable, but for those few Frenchmen who took their stand against corruption.
Now the future of civil society upon the earth depends upon the application to international politics of this familiar idea, which we see prefigured in our mythology, and monumentalized in our hospitals—the principle that what is done for one is done for all. When you say a thing is “right,” you appeal to mankind. What you mean is that everyone is at stake. Your attack upon wrong amounts to saying that some one has been left out in the calculation. Both at home and abroad you are always pleading for mercy, and the plea gains such a wide response that some tyranny begins to totter, and its engines are turned upon you to get you to stop. This outcry against you is the measure of your effectiveness. If you imitate Zola and attack some nuisance in this town to-morrow, you will bring on every symptom and have every experience of the Dreyfus affair. The cost is the same, for cold looks are worse than imprisonment. The emancipation of the reformer is the same, for if a man can resist the influences of his townsfolk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition. The public influence is the same, for every citizen of that town can thereafter look a town officer in the face with more self-respect. But not to townsmen, nor to neighboring towns, nor to Parisians is this force confined. It goes out in all directions, continuously. The man is in communication with the world. This impulse of communication with all men is at the bottom of every ambition. The injustice, cruelty, oppression in the world are all different forms of the same non-conductor, that prevents utterances, that stops messages, that strikes dumb the speaker and deafens the listener. You will find that it makes no difference whether the non-conductor be a selfish oligarchy, a military autocracy, or a commercial ring. The voice of humanity is stifled by corruption: and corruption is only an evil because it stifles men.
Try to raise a voice that shall be heard from here to Albany and watch what it is that comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father’s offering you a place in his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you young gentlemen have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations and a close enemy of most men who wish you well.
And what will you get in return? Well, if I must for the benefit of the economist, charge you with some selfish gain, I will say that you get the satisfaction of having been heard, and that this is the whole possible scope of human ambition.
When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that you cannot proclaim. Refuse to accept anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech, no matter what other power you lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners. As for your own private character it will be preserved by such a course. Crime you cannot commit, for crime gags you. Collusion with any abuse gags you. As a practical matter a mere failure to speak out upon occasions where no opinion is asked or expected of you, and when the utterance of an uncalled-for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. It will bind and gag you and lay you dumb and in shackles like the veriest serf in Russia. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don’t be gagged.
The choice of Hercules was made when Hercules was a lad. It cannot be made late in life. It will perhaps come for each one of you within the next eighteen months. I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. “In a few years,” reasons one of them, “I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my power for good.” Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. The great occasion that was to have let him loose on society was some little occasion that nobody saw, some moment in which he decided to obtain a standing. The great battle of a lifetime has been fought and lost over a silent scruple. But for this, the man might, within a few years, have spoken to the nation with the voice of an archangel. What was he waiting for? Did he think that the laws of nature were to be changed for him? Did he think that a “notice of trial” would be served on him? Or that some spirit would stand at his elbow and say, “Now’s your time?” The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time. And the compensation for beginning at once is that your voice carries at once. You do not need a standing. It would not help you. Within less time than you can see it, you will have been heard. The air is filled with sounding-boards and the echoes are flying. It is ten to one that you have but to lift your voice to be heard in California, and that from where you stand. A bold plunge will teach you that the visions of the unity of human nature which the poets have sung, were not the fictions of their imagination, but a record of what they saw. Deal with the world, and you will discover their reality. Speak to the world, and you will hear their echo.
Social and business prominence look like advantages, and so they are if you want money. But if you want moral influence you may bless God you have not got them. They are the payment with which the world subsidizes men to keep quiet, and there is no subtilty or cunning by which you can get them without paying in silence. This is the great law of humanity, that has existed since history began, and will last while man lasts—evil, selfishness, and silence are one thing.
The world is learning, largely through American experience that freedom in the form of government is no guarantee against abuse, tyranny, cruelty, and greed. The old sufferings, the old passions are in full blast among us. What, then, are the advantages of self-government? The chief advantage is that self-government enables a man in his youth, in his own town, within the radius of his first public interests, to fight the important battle of his life while his powers are at their strongest, and the powers of oppression are at their weakest. If a man acquires the power of speech here, if he says what he means now, if he makes his point and dominates his surroundings at once, his voice will, as a matter of fact, be heard instantly in a very wide radius. And so he walks up into a new sphere and begins to accomplish greater things. He does this through the very force of his insistence on the importance of small things. The reason for his graduation is not far to seek. A man cannot reach the hearts of his townsfolks, without using the whole apparatus of the world of thought. He cannot tell or act the truth in his own town without enlisting every power for truth, and setting in vibration the cords that knit that town into the world’s history. He is forced to find and strike the same note which he would use on some great occasion when speaking for all mankind. A man who has won a town-fight is a veteran, and our country to-day is full of these young men. To-morrow their force will show in national politics, and in that moment the fate of the Malay, the food of the Russian prisoner, the civilization of South Africa, and the future of Japan will be seen to have been in issue. These world problems are now being settled in the contest over the town-pump in a western village. I think it likely that the next thirty years will reveal the recuperative power of American institutions. One of you young men may easily become a reform President, and be carried into office and held in office by the force of that private opinion which is now being sown broadcast throughout the country by just such men as yourselves. You will concede the utility of such a President. Yet it would not be the man but the masses behind him that did his work.
Democracy thus lets character loose upon society and shows us that in the realm of natural law there is nothing either small or great: and this is the chief value of democracy. In America the young man meets the struggle between good and evil in the easiest form in which it was ever laid before men. The cruelties of interest and of custom have with us no artificial assistance from caste, creed, race prejudice. Our frame of government is drawn in close accordance with the laws of nature. By our documents we are dedicated to mankind; and hence it is that we can so easily feel the pulse of the world and lay our hand on the living organism of humanity.