INTRODUCTION
The history of democracy’s progress in a mid-Western city—so, to introduce this book in specific terms, one perhaps inevitably must call it. Yet in using the word democracy, one must plead for a distinction, or, better, a reversion, indicated by the curious anchylosis that, at a certain point in their maturity, usually sets in upon words newly put in use to express some august and large spiritual reality. We all know how this materializing tendency, if one may call it that, has affected our notion and our use of the commonest religious terms like faith, grace, salvation, for instance. Their connotation, originally fluid, spiritual and subjective, has become concrete, limited, partial, ignoble. So, too, in our common speech, even above the catchpenny vocabulary of the demagogue or politician, the word democracy has taken on the limited, partial and ignoble connotation of more or less incidental and provisional forms of democracy’s practical outcome; or even of by-products not directly traceable to the action of democracy itself. How often, for example, do we see direct primaries, the single tax, the initiative and referendum posed in a kind of sacramental relation to “fundamental democracy”; or the “essential movement of democracy” measured, say, by the increased returns on the Socialist ticket at some local election!
The permanent value of this book is that it proceeds out of a truly adequate and philosophical conception of democracy. That the collective human spirit should know itself, καταμαθεῖν τὴν φύσιν καὶ ταύτη ἕπεσθαι, that the state, the communal unit, should be, in Mr. Arnold’s phrase, “the expression of our best self, which is not manifold and vulgar and unstable and contentious and ever varying, but one and noble and secure and peaceful and the same for all mankind”; here we have in outline the operation of democracy. One could not give this volume higher praise than to say, as in justice one must say, that it clearly discerns and abundantly conveys the spirit which works in human nature toward this end.
How important it is to maintain this fluid, philosophical and spiritual view of democracy may be seen when we look about us and consider the plight of those—especially the many now concerned in politics, whether professionally or as eager amateurs—who for lack of it confuse various aspects of the political problem of liberty with the social problem of equality. With political liberty or with self-expression of the individual in politics, democracy has, and ever has had, very little to do. It is our turbid thought about democracy that prevents our seeing this. The aristocratic and truculent barons did more for the political freedom of Englishmen than was ever done by democracy; a selfish and sensual king did more to gain the individual Englishman his freedom of self-expression in politics. In our own country it is matter of open and notorious fact that a political party whose every sentiment and tendency is aristocratic has been the one to bring about the largest measures of political enfranchisement. Now, surely, one may heartily welcome every enlargement of political liberty, but if one attributes them to a parentage which is not theirs, if one relates them under democracy, the penalty which nature inexorably imposes upon error is sure to follow. If, therefore, in the following pages the author seems occasionally lukewarm toward certain enfranchising measures, I do not understand that he disparages them, but only that he sees—as their advocates, firmly set in the confusion we speak of, cannot see—that their connection with democracy is extremely indistinct and remote. Equality—a social problem, not to be worked out by the mechanics of politics, but appealing wholly to the best self, the best reason and spirit of man,—this is democracy’s concern, democracy’s chief interest. It is to our author’s praise, again, that he sees this clearly and expresses it convincingly.
By far the most admirable and impressive picture in this book appears to me to be that which the author has all unconsciously drawn of himself. It reveals once more that tragedy—the most profound, most common and most neglected of all the multitude of useless tragedies that our weak and wasteful civilization by sheer indifference permits—the tragedy of a richly gifted nature denied the opportunity of congenial self-expression. What by comparison is the tragedy of starvation, since so very many willingly starve, if haply they may find this opportunity? The author is an artist, a born artist. His natural place is in a world unknown and undreamed of by us children of an age commissioned to carry out the great idea of industrial and political development. He belongs by birthright in the eternal realm of divine impossibilities, of sublime and delightful inconsistencies. Greatly might he have fulfilled his destiny in music, in poetry, in painting had he been born at one of those periods when spiritual activity was all but universal, when spiritual ideas were popular and dominant, volitantes per ora virum, part of the very air one breathed—in the Greece of Pericles, the England of Elizabeth, or on the Tuscan hills at the time of the Florentine Renaissance! But this was not to be. An admirer, jealous of every possible qualification, reminds me that I should call him at least a philosophical artist; yes, but not by nature even that. The toga did not drop upon him readymade from a celestial loom. It was woven and fitted laboriously by his own hands. He sought philosophical consistency and found it and established himself in it; but only as part of the difficult general discipline of an alien life.
What an iron discipline, and how thoroughly alien a life, stands revealed to the eye of poetic insight and the spirit of sympathetic delicacy, on every page of these memoirs. For the over-refined (as we say), the oversensitive soul of a born artist—think of the experience, think of the achievement! The very opposite of all that makes a politician, appraising politics always at their precise value, yet patiently spending all the formative years of his life in the debilitating air of politics for the sake of what he might indirectly accomplish. Not an executive, yet incessantly occupied with tedious details of administrative work, for the satisfaction of knowing them well done. Not a philosopher, yet laboriously making himself what Glanvil quaintly calls “one of those larger souls who have traveled the divers climates of opinion” until he acquired a social philosophy that should meet his own exacting demands.
Is it too much, then, that I invite the reader’s forbearance with these paragraphs to show why our author should himself take rank and estimation with the great men whom he reverently pictures? He tells the story of Altgeld and of Johnson, energetic champions of the newer political freedom. He tells the story of Jones, the incomparable true democrat, one of the children of light and sons of the Resurrection, such as appear but once in an era. And in the telling of these men and of himself as the alien and, in his own view, largely accidental continuator of their work, it seems to me that he indicates the process by which he too has worked out his own position among them as “one of those consoling and hope-inspiring marks which stand forever to remind our weak and easily discouraged race how high human goodness and perseverance have once been carried and may be carried again.”
ALBERT JAY NOCK.
THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE,
NEW YORK.