THERE is danger that my subject of American good citizenship is so familiar and so trite as to lack interest. This does not necessarily result from a want of appreciation of the importance of good citizenship, nor from a denial of the duty resting upon every American to be a good citizen. There is, however, abroad in our land a self-satisfied and perfunctory notion that we do all that is required of us in this direction when we make profession of our faith in the creed of good citizenship and abstain from the commission of palpably unpatriotic sins.
We ought not to be badgered and annoyed by the preaching and exhortation of a restless, troublesome set of men, who continually urge upon us the duty of active and affirmative participation in public affairs. Why should we be charged with neglect of political obligations? We go to the polls on election day, when not too busy with other things, and vote the ticket our party managers have prepared for us. Sometimes, when conditions grow to be so bad politically that a revival or stirring-up becomes necessary, a goodly number of us actually devote considerable time and effort to better the situation. Of course, we cannot do this always, because we must not neglect money-getting and the promotion of great enterprises, which, as everybody knows, are the evidence of a nation’s prosperity and influence.
It seems to me that within our citizenship there are many whose disposition and characteristics very often resemble those found in the membership of our churches. In this membership there is a considerable proportion composed of those who, having made profession of their faith and joined the church, appear to think their duty done when they live honestly, attend worship regularly, and contribute liberally to church support. In complacent satisfaction, and certain of their respectability, they do not care to hear sermonizing concerning the sinfulness of human nature, or the wrath to come; and if haply they are sometimes roused by the truths of vital Christianity, they soon relapse again to their tranquil and easy condition of listlessness. A description of these, found in the Holy Writ, may fitly apply to many in the State as well as in the church:
“For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.”
There is an habitual associate of civic American indifference and listlessness, which reënforces their malign tendencies and adds tremendously to the dangers that threaten our body politic. This associate plays the rôle of smooth, insinuating confidence operator and, clothed in the garb of immutable faith in the invulnerability of our national greatness, it invites our admiring gaze to the flight of the American eagle, and assures us that no tempestuous weather can ever tire his wings. Thus many good and honest men are approached through their patriotic trust in our free institutions and immense national resources, and are insidiously led to a condition of mind which will not permit them to harbor the uncomfortable thought that any omission on their part can check American progress or endanger our country’s continued development. Have we not lived as a nation more than a century; and have we not exhibited growth and achievement in every direction that discredit all parallels in history? After us the deluge. Why then need we bestir ourselves, and why disturb ourselves with public affairs?
Those of our citizens who are deluded by these notions, and who allow themselves to be brought to such a frame of mind, may well be reminded of the good old lady who was wont to impressively declare that she had always noticed if she lived until the first of March she lived all the rest of the year. It is quite likely she built a theory upon this experience which induced her with the passing of each of these fateful days to defy coughs, colds and consumption and the attacks of germs and microbes in a million forms. However this may be, we know that with no design or intention on her part, there came a first day of March which passed without her earthly notice.
The withdrawal of wholesome sentiment and patriotic activity from political action on the part of those who are indifferent to their duty, or foolhardy in their optimism, opens the way for a ruthless and unrelenting enemy of our free institutions. The abandonment of our country’s watch-towers by those who should be on guard, and the slumber of the sentinels who should never sleep, directly invite the stealthy approach and the pillage and loot of the forces of selfishness and greed. These baleful enemies of patriotic effort will lurk everywhere as long as human nature remains unregenerate; but nowhere in the world can they create such desolations as in free America, and nowhere can they so cruelly destroy man’s highest and best aspirations for self-government.
It is useless for us to blink at the fact that our scheme of government is based upon a close interdependence of interest and purpose among those who make up the body of our people. Let us be honest with ourselves. If our nation was built too much upon sentiment, and if the rules of patriotism and benignity that were followed in the construction have proved too impractical, let us frankly admit it. But if love of country, equal opportunity and genuine brotherhood in citizenship are worth the pains and trials that gave them birth, and if we still believe them to be worth preservation and that they have the inherent vigor and beneficence to make our republic lasting and our people happy, let us strongly hold them in love and devotion. Then it shall be given us to plainly see that nothing is more unfriendly to the motives that underlie our national edifice than the selfishness and cupidity that look upon freedom and law and order only as so many agencies in aid of their designs.
Our government was made by patriotic, unselfish, sober-minded men for the control or protection of a patriotic, unselfish and sober-minded people. It is suited to such a people; but for those who are selfish, corrupt and unpatriotic it is the worst government on earth. It is so constructed that it needs for its successful operation the constant care and guiding hand of the people’s abiding faith and love, and not only is this unremitting guidance necessary to keep our national mechanism true to its work, but the faith and love which prompt it are the best safeguards against selfish citizenship.
Give to our people something that will concentrate their common affection and solicitous care, and let them be their country’s good; give them a purpose that stimulates them to unite in lofty endeavor, and let that purpose be a demonstration of the sufficiency and beneficence of our popular rule, and we shall find that in their political thought there will be no place for the suggestions of sordidness and pelf.
Who will say that this is now our happy condition? Is not our public life saturated with the indecent demands of selfishness? More than this, can any of us doubt the existence of still more odious and detestable evils which, with steady, cankering growth, are more directly than all others threatening our safety and national life? I speak of the corruption of our suffrage, open and notorious, of the buying and selling of political places for money, the purchase of political favors and privileges, and the traffic in official duty for personal gain. These things are confessedly common. Every intelligent man knows that they have grown from small beginnings until they have reached frightful proportions of malevolence; and yet respectable citizens by the thousands have looked on with perfect calmness, and with hypocritical cant have declared they are not politicians, or with silly pretensions of faith in our strength and luck have languidly claimed that the country was prosperous, equal to any emergency and proof against all dangers.
Resulting from these conditions in a manner not difficult to trace, wholesome national sentiment is threatened with utter perversion. All sorts of misconceptions pervade the public thought, and jealousies, rapidly taking on the complexion of class hatred, are found in every corner of the land. A new meaning has been given to national prosperity. With a hardihood that savors of insolence, an old pretext, which has preceded the doom of ancient experiments in popular vote, is daily and hourly dinned in our ears. We are told that the national splendor we have built upon the showy ventures of speculative wealth is a badge of our success. Unsharing contentment is enjoined upon the masses of our people, and they are invited, in the bare subsistence of their scanty homes, to patriotically rejoice in their country’s prosperity.
This is too unsubstantial an enjoyment of benefits to satisfy those who have been taught American equality, and thus has arisen, by a perfectly natural process, a dissatisfied insistence upon a better distribution of the results of our vaunted prosperity. We now see its worst manifestation in the apparently incorrigible dislocation of the proper relations between labor and capital. This of itself is sufficiently distressing; but thoughtful men are not without dread of sadder developments yet to come.
There has also grown up among our people a disregard for the restraints of law and a disposition to evade its limitations, while querulous strictures concerning the actions of our courts tend to undermine popular faith in the course of justice, and, last but by no means least, complaints of imaginary or exaggerated shortcomings in our financial policies furnish an excuse for the flippant exploitation of all sorts of monetary nostrums.
I hasten to give assurance that I have not spoken in a spirit of gloomy pessimism. I have faith that the awakening is forthcoming, and on this faith I build a cheerful hope for the healing of all the wounds inflicted in slumber and neglect.
It is true that there should be an end of self-satisfied gratification, or pretense of virtue, in the phrase, “I am not a politician,” and it is time to forbid the prostitution of the word to a sinister use. Every citizen should be politician enough to bring himself within the true meaning of the term, as one who concerns himself with “the regulation or government of a nation or State for the preservation of its safety, peace and prosperity.” This is politics in its best sense, and this is good citizenship.
If good men are to interfere to make political action what it should be, they must not suppose they will come upon an open field unoccupied by an opposing force. On the ground they neglected they will find a host of those who engage in politics for personal ends and selfish purposes, and this ground cannot be taken without a hand-to-hand conflict. The attack must be made under the banner of disinterested good citizenship, by soldiers drilled in lessons of patriotism. They must be enlisted for life and constantly on duty.
Their creed should bind together in generous coöperation all who are willing to fight to make our government what the fathers intended it to be—a depository of benefits which, in equal current and volume, should flow out to all the people. This creed should teach the wickedness of attempting to make free opportunity the occasion for seizing especial advantages, and should warn against the danger of ruthless rapacity. It should deprecate ostentation and extravagance in the life of our people, and demand in the management of public affairs simplicity and strict economy. It should teach toleration in all things save dishonesty and infidelity to public trusts.
It should insist that our finance and currency concern not alone the large traders, merchants and bankers of our land, but that they are intimately and every day related to the well-being of our people in all conditions of life, and that, therefore, if any adjustments are necessary they should be made in such manner as shall certainly maintain the soundness of our people’s earnings and the security of their savings. It should enjoin respect for the law as the quality that cements the fabric of organized society and makes possible a government by the people. And in every sentence and every line of this creed of good citizenship the lesson should be taught that our country is a beautiful and productive field to be cultivated by loyal Americans, who, with weapons near at hand, whether they sow and reap or whether they rest, will always be prepared to resist those who attempt to despoil by day and pilfer in the night.
In the day when all shadows shall have passed away and when good citizenship shall have made sure the safety, permanence and happiness of our nation, how small will appear the strifes of selfishness in our civic life, and how petty will seem the machinations of degraded politics.
There shall be set over against them in that time a reverent sense of coöperation in Heaven’s plans for our people’s greatness, and the joyous pride of standing among those who, in the comradeship of American good citizenship, have so protected and defended our heritage of self-government that our treasures are safe in the citadel of patriotism, “where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.”