would have been collected for transmuting the
sex impulse into art, into social endeavor, into
religion. That is the constructive approach to
148
WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING
the problem. I note that the Commission calls
upon the churches for help. Its obvious intention
was to down sex with religion. What was not
realized, it seems, Is that this very sex impulse,
so largely degraded into vice, is the dynamic force
in religious feeling. One need not call in the testi-
mony of the psychologists, the students of re-
ligion, the aestheticians or even of Plato, who in
the "Symposium" traced out the hierarchy of love
from the body to the 'Vhole sea of beauty."
Jane Addams in Chicago has tested the truth by
her own wide experience, and she has written
what the Commission might easily have read, ā
that 'Sn failing to diffuse and utilize this funda-
mental Instinct of sex through the Imagination, we
not only inadvertently foster vice and enervation,
but we throw away one of the most precious im-
plements for ministering to life's highest needs.
There is no doubt that this ill-adjusted function
consumes quite unnecessarily vast stores of vital
energy, even when we contemplate It In its imma-
ture manifestations which are Infinitely more
wholesome than the dumb swamping process. All
high school boys and girls know the difference be-
tween the concentration and the diffusion of this
Impulse, although they would be hopelessly be-
wildered by the use of terms. They will declare
149
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
one of their companions to be *in love' if his
fancy Is occupied by the Image of a single person
about whom all the new-found values gather, and
without whom his solitude Is an eternal melan-
choly. But If the stimulus does not appear as a
definite image, and the values evoked are dis-
pensed over the world, the young person suddenly
seems to have discovered a beauty and significance
in many things ā he responds to poetry, he be-
comes a lover of nature, he Is filled with religious
devotion or with philanthropic zeal. Experience,
with young people, easily illustrates the possibility
and value of diffusion."
It is then not only impossible to confine sex to
mere reproduction; It would be a stupid denial of
the finest values of civilization. Having seen that
the impulse is a necessary part of character, we
must not hold to it grudgingly as a necessary evil.
It Is, on the contrary, the very source of good.
Whoever has visited Hull House can see for him-
self the earnest effort Miss Addams has made to
treat sex with dignity and joy. For Hull House
differs from most settlements in that it Is full of
pictures, of color, and of curios. The atmosphere
is light; you feel none of that moral oppression
which hangs over the usual settlement as over a
gathering of missionaries. Miss Addams has not
150
WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING
only made Hull House a beautiful place; she has
stocked It with curious and interesting objects.
The theater, the museum, the crafts and the arts,
games and dances ā they are some of those *'other
methods of expression which lust can seek." It
is no accident that Hull House is the most suc-
cessful settlement in America.
Yet who does not feel its Isolation in that
brutal city? A little Athens in a vast barbarism
ā you wonder how much of Chicago Hull House
can civilize. As you walk those grim streets and
look Into the stifling houses, or picture the re-
lentless stockyards, the conviction that vice and
its misery cannot be transmuted by policemen and
Morals Commissions, the feeling that spying and
inspecting and prosecuting will not drain the
marsh becomes a certainty. You want to shout
at the forcible morallzer: "so long as you ac-
quiesce In the degradation of your city, so long
as work remains nothing but ill-paid drudgery
and every instinct of joy is mocked by dirt and
cheapness and brutality, ā just so long will your
efforts be fruitless, yes even though you raid and
prosecute, even though you make Comstock the
Czar of Chicago."
But Hull House cannot remake Chicago. A
few hundred lives can be changed, and for the
151
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
rest It Is a guide to the Imagination. Like all
Utopias, It cannot succeed, but It may point the
way to success. If Hull House Is unable to civ-
ilize Chicago, It at least shows Chicago and
America what a civilization might be like.
Friendly, where our cities are friendless, beauti-
ful, where they are ugly; sociable and open, where
our daily life Is furtive; work a craft; art a par-
ticipation ā it is In miniature the goal of states-
manship. If Chicago were like Hull House, we
say to ourselves, then vice would be no problem
ā It would dwindle, what was left would be the
Falstaff in us all, and only a spiritual anemia
could worry over that jolly and redeeming coarse-
ness.
What stands between Chicago and civiliza-
tion? No one can doubt that to abolish prostitu-
tion means to abolish the slum and the dirty
alley, to stop overwork, underpay, the sweating
and the torturing monotony of business, to
breathe a new life Into education, ventilate society
with frankness, and fill life with play and art,
with games, with passions which hold and suffuse
the Imagination.
It Is a revolutionary task, and like all real revo-
lutions it will not be done in a day or a decade
because someone orders It to be done. A change
15^
WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING
in the whole quality of life is something that
neither the policeman's club nor an Insurrection-
ary raid can achieve. If you want a revolution
that shall really matter In human life ā and what
sane man can help desiring It? ā you must look to
the Infinitely complicated results of the dynamic
movements in society. These revolutions require
a rare combination of personal audacity and so-
cial patience. The best agents of such a revolu-
tion are men who are bold In their plans because
they realize how deep and enormous is the task.
Many people have sought an analogy in our
Civil War. They have said that as '*black sla-
very" went, so must 'Vhlte slavery." In the
various agitations of vigilance committees and
alliances for the suppression of the traffic they
profess to see continued a work which the abo-
litionists began.
In A. M. Simons' brilliant book on ^'Social
Forces in American History" much help can be
found. For example: "Massachusetts abolished
slavery at an early date, and we have it on the
authority of John Adams that: ā 'argument
might have had some weight In the abolition of
slavery in Massachusetts, but the real cause was
the multiplication of laboring white people, who
would not longer suffer the rich to employ these
158
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
sable rivals so much to their injury.' " No one
to-day doubts that white labor in the North and
slavery in the South were not due to the moral
superiority of the North. Yet just in the North
we find the abolition sentiment strongest. That
the Civil War was not a clash of good men and
bad men is admitted by every reputable historian.
The war did not come when moral fervor had
risen to the exploding point; the moral fervor
came rather when the economic interests of the
South collided with those of the North. That
the abolitionists clarified the economic interests of
the North and gave them an ideal sanction is true
enough. But the fact remains that by i860 some
of the aspirations of Phillips and Garrison had
become the economic destiny of this country.
You can have a Hull House established by pri-
vate initiative and maintained by individual
genius, just as you had planters who freed their
slaves or as 3^ou have employers to-day who hu-
manize their factories. But the fine example is
not readily imitated when industrial forces fight
against it. So even If the Commission had drawn
splendid plans for housing, work conditions, edu-
cation, and play it would have done only part of
the task of statesmanship. We should then know
what to do, but not how to get it done.
164f
WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING
An ideal suspended In a vacuum is ineffective:
it must point a dynamic current. Only then does
it gather power, only then does It enter into life.
That forces exist to-day which carry with them
solutions is evident to anyone who has watched
the labor movement and the woman's awakening.
Even the Interests of business give power to the
cause. The discovery of manufacturers that deg-
radation spoils Industrial efficiency must not be
cast aside by the radical because the motive is
larger profits. The discovery, whatever the mo-
tive, will inevitably humanize industry a good
deal. For it happens that in this case the inter-
ests of capitalism and of humanity coincide. A
propaganda like the single-tax will undoubtedly
find increasing support among business men.
They see in it a relief from the burden of rent
imposed by that older tyrant ā the landlord. But
the taxation of unimproved property happens at
the same time to be a splendid weapon against the
slum.
Only when the abolition of **whlte slavery" be-
comes part of the social currents of the time will
it bear any interesting analogy to the so-called
freeing of the slaves. Even then for many en-
thusiasts the comparison Is misleading. They are
likely to regard the Emancipation Proclamation
155
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
as the end of chattel slavery. It wasn't. That
historic document broke a legal bond but not a
social one. The process of negro emancipation is
infinitely slower and it is not accomplished yet.
Likewise no statute can end *'white slavery.'*
Only vast and complicated changes in the whole
texture of social life will achieve such an end. If
by some magic every taboo of the commission
could be enforced the abolition of sex slavery
would not have come one step nearer to reality.
Cities and factories, schools and homes, theaters
and games, manners and thought will have to be
transformed before sex can find a better expres-
sion. Living forces, not statutes or clubs, must
work that change. The power of emancipation is
in the social movements which alone can effect
any deep reform in a nation. So it is and has
been with the negro. I do not think the Aboli-
tionists saw facts truly when they disbanded their
organization a few years after the civil war.
They found too much comfort in a change of
legal status. Profound economic forces brought
about the beginning of the end of chattel slavery.
But the reality of freedom was not achieved by
proclamation. For that the revolution had to go
on: the industrial life of the nation had to change
its character, social customs had to be replaced,
156
WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING
the whole outlook of men had to be transformed.
And whether It Is negro slavery or a vicious sexual
bondage, the actual advance comes from substitu-
tions injected Into society by dynamic social forces.
I do not wish to press the analogy or over-em-
phasize the particular problems. I am not en-
gaged in drawing up the plans for a reconstruc-
tion or in telling just what should be done. Only
the co-operation of expert minds can do that.
The place for a special propaganda is elsewhere.
If these essays succeed in suggesting a method of
looking at politics, if they draw attention to what
Is real in social reforms and make somewhat more
evident the traps and the blind-alleys of an un-
critical approach, they will have done their work.
That the report of the Chicago Vice Commission
figures so prominently in this chapter is not due
to any preoccupation with Chicago, the Commis-
sion or with vice. It is a text and nothing else.
The report happens to embody what I conceive
to be most of the faults of a political method now
decadent. Its failure to put human Impulses at
the center of thought produced remedies value-
less to human nature; its false interest In a par-
ticular expression of sex ā vice ā caused it to
taboo the civilizing power of sex; Its inability to
see that wants require fine satisfactions and not
157
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
prohibitions drove it into an undemocratic
tyranny; its blindness to the social forces of our
age shut off the motive power for any reform.
The Commission's method was poor, not its
intentions. It was an average body of American
citizens aroused to action by an obvious evil. But
something slipped in to falsify vision. It was, I
believe, an array of idols disguised as ideals.
They are typical American idols, and they deserve
some study.
158
CHAPTER VI
SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM
The Commission "has kept constantly in mind
that to offer a contribution of any value such an
offering must be^ first, moral; second, reasonable
and practical; third, possible under the Constitu-
tional powers of our Courts; fourth, that which
will square with the public conscience of the
American people." ā The Vice Commission of
Chicago ā Introduction to Report on the Social
Evil.
HAVING adjusted such spectacles the Com-
mission proceeded to look at ''this curse
which is more blasting than any plague or epi-
demic," at an evil "which spells only ruin to the
race." In dealing with what it regards as the
greatest calamity in the world, a calamity as old
as civilization, the Commission lays it down be-
forehand that the remedy must be "moral," con-
stitutional, and satisfactory to the public con-
science. I wonder in all seriousness what the
Commission would. have done had it discovered
a genuine cure for prostitution which happened,
159
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
let US say, to conflict with the constitutional pow-
ers of our courts. I wonder how the Commission
would have acted if a humble following of the
facts had led them to a conviction out of tune
with the existing public conscience of America.
Such a conflict is not only possible; it is highly
probable. When you come to think of it, the
conflict appears a certainty. For the Constitution
is a legal expression of the conditions under which
prostitution has flourished; the social evil is
rooted in institutions and manners which have
promoted it, in property relations and business
practice which have gathered about them a halo
of reason and practicality, of morality and con-
science. Any change so vast as the abolition of
vice is of necessity a change in morals, practice,
law and conscience.
A scientist who began an investigation by say-
ing that his results must be moral or constitutional
would be a joke. We have had scientists like
that, men who insisted that research must con-
firm the Biblical theory of creation. We have
had economists who set out with the preconceived
idea of justifying the factory system. The world
has recently begun to see through this kind of in-
tellectual fraud. If a doctor should appear who
offered a cure for tuberculosis on the ground that
160
SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM
it was justified by the Bible and that It conformed
to the opinions of that great mass of the Ameri-
can people who believe that fresh air Is the devil,
we should promptly lock up that doctor as a dan-
gerous quack. When the negroes of Kansas were
said to be taking pink pills to guard themselves
against Halley's Comet, they were doing some-
thing which appeared to them as eminently prac-
tical and entirely reasonable. Not long ago we
read of the savage way in which a leper was
treated out West; his leprosy was not regarded
as a disease, but as the curse of God, and, if I
remember correctly, the Bible was quoted In court
as an authority on leprosy. The treatment seemed
entirely moral and squared very well with the con-
science of that community.
I have heard reputable physicians condemn a
certain method of psychotherapy because It was
"Immoral." A woman once told me that she had
let her son grow up ignorant of his sexual life
because **a mother should never mention an}thing
^embarrassing' to her child." Many of us are
still blushing for the way America treated Gorki
when It found that Russian morals did not square
with the public conscience of America. And the
time is not yet passed when we punish the off-
spring of illicit love, and visit vengeance unto the
161
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
third and fourth generations. One reads in the
report of the Vice Commission that many public
hospitals in Chicago refuse to care for venereal
diseases. The examples are endless. They run
from the absurd to the monstrous. But always
the source is the same. Idols are set up to which
all the living must bow; we decide beforehand
that things must fit a few preconceived Ideas. And
when they don't, which Is most of the time, we
deny truth, falsify facts, and prefer the coddling
of our theory to any deeper understanding of the
real problem before us.
It seems as if a theory were never so active as
when the reality behind it has disappeared. The
empty name, the ghostly phrase, exercise an au-
thority that is appalling. When you think of the
blood that has been shed in the name of Jesus,
when you think of the Holy Roman Empire,
''neither holy nor Roman nor Imperial," of the
constitutional phrases that cloak all sorts of thiev-
ery, of the common law precedents that tyrannize
over us, history begins to look almost like the
struggle of man to emancipate himself from
phrase-worship. The devil can quote Scripture,
and law, and morality and reason and practicality.
The devil can use the public conscience of his
time. He does in wars, in racial and religious
162
SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM
persecutions; he did in the Spain of the Inquisi-
tion; he does in the American lynching.
For there is nothing so bad but it can masquer-
ade as moral. Conquerors have gone forth with
the blessing of popes; a nation invokes its God
before beginning a campaign of murder, rape and
pillage. The ruthless exploitation of India be-
comes the civilizing fulfilment of the "white man's
burden"; not infrequently the missionary, drum-
mer, and prospector are embodied in one man.
In the nineteenth century church, press and uni-
versity devoted no inconsiderable part of their
time to proving the high moral and scientific jus-
tice of child labor and human sweating. It is a
matter of record that chattel slavery in this coun-
try was deduced from Biblical injunction, that the
universities furnished brains for its defense.
Surely Bernard Shaw was not describing the Eng-
lishman alone when he said in "The Man of Des-
tiny'' that " . . . . you will never find an
Englishman in the wrong. He does everything
on principle. He fights you on patriotic princi-
ples; he robs you on business principles. ..."
Liberty, equality, fraternity ā what a grotesque
career those words have had. Almost every at-
tempt to mitigate the hardships of industrialism
has had to deal with the bogey of liberty. Labor
163
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
organization, factory laws, health regulations are
still fought as infringements of liberty. And in
the name of equality what fantasies of taxation
have we not woven? what travesties of justice set
up? "The law in its majestic equality,'' writes
Anatole France, "forbids the rich as well as the
poor to sleep in the streets and to steal bread."
Fraternity becomes the hypocritical slogan by
which we refuse to enact what is called "class
legislation" ā a policy which in theory denies the
existence of classes, in practice legislates in favor
of the rich. The laws which go unchallenged
are laws friendly to business; class legislation
means working-class legislation.
You have to go among lawyers to see this idol-
atrous process in its most perfect form. When a
judge sets out to "interpret" the Constitution,
what is it that he does? He takes a sentence
written by a group of men more than a hundred
years ago. That sentence expressed their policy
about certain conditions which they had to deal
with. In it was summed up what they intended
to do about the problems they saw. That is all
the sentence means. But in the course of a cen-
tury new problems arise ā problems the Fathers
could no more have foreseen than we can foresee
the problems of the year two thousand. Yet that
164
SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASiM
sentence which contained their wisdom about par-
ticular events has acquired an emotional force
which persists long after the events have passed
away. Legends gather about the men who wrote
it: those legends are absorbed by us almost with
our mothers' milk. We never again read that
sentence straight. It has a gravity out of all pro-
portion to its use, and we call it a fundamental
principle of government. Whatever we want to
do is hallowed and justified, if it can be made to
appear as a deduction from that sentence. To
put new wine in old bottles is one of the aims of
legal casuistry.
Reformers practice it. You hear it said that
the initiative and referendum are a return to the
New England town meeting. That is supposed
to be an argument for direct legislation. But
surely the analogy is superficial; the difference
profound. The infinitely greater complexity of
legislation to-day, the vast confusion in the aims
of the voting population, produce a difference of
so great a degree that it amounts to a difference
in kind. The naturalist may classify the dog and
the fox, the house-cat and the tiger together for
certain purposes. The historian of political forms
may see in the town meeting a forerunner of di-
rect legislation. But no housewife dare classify
165
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
the cat and the tiger, the dog and the fox, as the
same kind of animal. And no statesman can
argue the virtues of the referendum from the suc-
cesses of the town meeting.
But the propagandists do It nevertheless, and
their propaganda thrives upon It. The reason Is
simple. The town meeting Is an obviously re-
spectable Institution, glorified by all the reverence
men give to the dead. It has acquired the seal of
an admired past, and any proposal that can bor-
row that seal can borrow that reverence too. A
name trails behind it an army of associations.
That army will fight in any cause that bears the
name. So the reformers of California, the Lori-
merltes of Chicago, and the Barnes Republicans
of Albany all use the name of Lincoln for their
political associations. In the struggle that pre-
ceded the Republican Convention of 19 12 it was
rumored that the Taft reactionaries would put
forward Lincoln's son as chairman of the conven-
tion in order to counteract Roosevelt's claim that
he stood in Lincoln's shoes.
Casuistry Is nothing but the injection of your
own meaning into an old name. At school when
the teacher asked us whether we had studied the
lesson, the Invariable answer was Yes. We had
indeed stared at the page for a few minutes, and
166
SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM
that could be called studying. Sometimes the
head-master would break into the room just in
time to see the conclusion of a scuffle. Jimmy's
clothes are white with dust. "Johnny, did you
throw chalk at Jimmy?" "No, sir," says Johnny,
and then under his breath to placate God's pen-
chant for truth, "I threw the chalk-eraser." Once
in Portland, Maine, I ordered iced tea at an hotel.
The waitress brought me a glass of yellowish
liquid with a two-inch collar of foam at the top.
No tea I had ever seen outside of a prohibition
state looked like that. Though it was tea, it
might have been beer. Perhaps if I had smiled
or winked in ordering the tea, it would have been
beer. The two looked alike in Portland; they
were interchangeable. You could drink tea and
fool yourself into thinking it was beer. You
could drink beer and pass for a tea-toper.
It Is rare, I think, that the fraud is so genial
and so deliberate. The openness cleanses it. Ad-
vertising, for example, would be nothing but gi-
gantic and systematic lying if almost everybody
didn't know that it was. Yet it runs into the sin-
ister all the time. The pure food agitation is
largely an effort to make the label and the con-
tents tell the same story. It was noteworthy
that, following the discovery of salvarsan or
167
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
"606" by Dr. Ehrllch, the quack doctors began
to call their treatments *'6o6.'* But the deliber-
ate casuistry of lawyers, quacks, or politicians is
not so difficult to deal with. The very delibera-
tion makes it easier to detect, for it is generally
awkward. What one man can consciously de-
vise, other men can understand.
But unconscious casuistry deceives us all. No
one escapes it entirely. A wealth of evidence
could be adduced to support this from the studies
of dreams and fantasies made by the Freudian