To a Friend in Politics

MY DEAR FRIEND, — When you read this, you will have got over the excitement of one campaign, and hardly yet be preparing for another, so you may spare some minutes for a friend with whom you have often argued — I will not say wrangled — on the old question whether the way in which you save us the trouble of electing our own rulers is the best for all parties; personal “ parties,” that is, not political.

Certainly the terms generally applied to your calling are not quite those you would like to hear. The tone in which people say, “ Oh, he’s a politician,” is not that in which they say, “ He’s a doctor,” or “ He’s a lawyer ; ” it sounds much more like that which accompanies the word “ shyster ” or “ quack.” True, every occupation has to take its share of bitter abuse and stale jokes, till one would think we were all cheats and robbers alike. But I hear you talked of as if not merely the tail end of you, the stragglers, malingerers, and camp followers, but the rank and file, the line and field officers, nay, the generals themselves, were all tainted with the corruption which our farming brother ascribes to all bankers, or the average citizen in a time of frost to all plumbers. If a youth just entering life proposed to be a politician, you know many of his respectable friends would wish him an honester trade.

Lately, a number of thoughtful men resolved to press the study of the science and art of government and the duties of a citizen, the proper name of which is simply “ politics ; ” yet they felt obliged to invent the fantastic word “ civics,” because the other appeared to them irretrievably perverted to a narrower and lower sense.

I live in the hope of seeing this altered ; of hearing “politics” and “politicians ” recover a meaning as honorable as now belongs to “ law ” and “ lawyers.” I am afraid you will tell me that this, like many of my visions, is “ unpractical.” ¹ That is the specific point I desire to present in this letter. I am perfectly indifferent, my good friend, to your own party connections. You may be just now a Publican, or an Acrobat, or a Paralyat, or a Rationalist, or a Mongoos.1 But I believe — of most of you I know — that you are attached to some party ; that you have provided yourself with regularly patented machines, bought at a licensed retailer’s, and fitted with the usual appliances of primaries, — which are not such, — caucuses, conventions, and the wires in pretty good order to pull. I know some of you have tried all the machines now on the market: one has seemed clumsy, another shackly, another wobbly ; one wants a great deal of oiling to make it run smooth ; another has to be so constantly fed with soap that there is hardly time and room to get at it to do work ; and with another the waste used to clean its joints is so apt to get foul that every new scrubbing clogs it still more. Nor do I see that any of the new patents recently exploited do the work noticeably better than the old unreliables.

I will not run this comparison into the ground ; you could follow it out, from your experience, much better than I can. It is enough that you, my friend, to whom I write, are connected with one or other of the recognized organizations, working in its interests to turn out just such a fabric of practical politics as it gives, and no other, be it better or worse ; which particular one each of you helps to run matters not to me just now.

It is certain that your politics have not prevented your being a good fellow. I find you a first-rate fellow, not only with your associates, but, on suitable occasions, to your opponents. You make an excellent club member ; a good companion, of one kind, for a non-partisan excursion, — say a municipal jaunt down the harbor, or the funeral escort of a member of Congress. And there is one trouble : you are very much too good a fellow for the serious work which the country lets you do. Good fellowship tends to turn everything into fun and evade disputes ; its motto is, “ Live and let live ; ” fall into your comrades’ ways, bear with their oddities, take their jokes, and have matters go easy. All very pretty, if one’s object is merely to have a good time from hour to hour ; but that is not the end of politics ; you have got the present and the future of the United States in your hands. You are not getting up for the stage Julius Cæsar or the Critic, still less the American Senator or the Gilded Age ; you are really governing “ regions Cæsar never knew.” If you make a joke of everything and suppress your serious views, if you make politics only a sport and Congress merely a club-room, do not be surprised if one day you find your baccarat and your poker violently raided by that Vigilance Committee of the American people that is never wholly disbanded.

Last winter, any one who had a good seat in the gallery of the House of Representatives, and was watching the face of one of you who has contrived to train with one party and shoot with the other, might have seen him, in one of his pauses, after denouncing the administration and the opposition alike with thunders of eloquence, relax his features into a grin as he looked down on his associates, who knew he was talking for the ubiquitous County of Buncombe, the best represented in the Union.

I believe, too, you have your share of patriotism, a quality you do not always get credit for ; not the mock patriotism that is always furbishing its sword and waving the stars and stripes, but a real wish to have the country prosperous. I really believe you would rather see the crops good, and the railroads paying, and the death-rate low, even if the other party were in power, than to see the reverse under the rule of your own friends. We will admit, for argument’s sake, that if prosperity does exist under the other party, it is because yours had laid the foundations of the national welfare too deep to be obscured by the temporary cloud of delusion ; or if there is ever adversity under you, it is because the virus with which the body politic was inoculated by your adversaries, though dissipated by the triumphal call of the American eagle, has not yet worked itself entirely free from its shackles, — or words to that effect. I believe you honestly think your rival machines, or at all events some party machines, are necessary to keep the country going ; and when you admit, as you often do, that they are far from perfect, and do entail some inconvenience on the people, you are sure to add that the country must be governed by party, and that the machinery, which we outside theorists call rusty shackly, and, what is worst of all, as destructive to honesty and purity as a trolley is to human life, is simply “ practical politics.” But is it practical ? Does it work ? It is on just that one point I am writing to you now.

I confess I distrust that word “ practical.” It is apt to suggest to me some short cut to a special end, when proper form and courtesy, not to say generosity and justice, prescribe different methods. When civil service reform was started, it was scouted as “ unpractical.” It has proved entirely expeditious and efficient for securing the right men ; but it blocks a certain way of paying political debts. “ Practical ” as opposed to “ ideal ” methods are likely to be based on the notion of the end’s justifying the means.

But do you practical politicians get what you try for, assuming you have a right to try for it ? You cannot deny that your system of local committees and grand committees, and caucuses and conventions, and subscriptions and “ rallies,” uses up much time and much money in the sight of every one, and a good deal more time and indefinitely more money that no one sees at all. It is certainly not direct or economical, but very costly and very complicated. It also involves far more tact and personal management than is needed in any other business ; the way it handles truth so as to dole it out, in just such portions as will answer for the moment, alone requires years of apprenticeship to learn. Now what do you do it all for ? To put and keep your party — whichever it is — in power ; to see that it gets its full share of spoils, so far as the stupidity of so-called reformers permits, and that it secures a general hold on public opinion, so as ultimately to swallow up and confound such cranks and malecontents as fly off to third, fourth, fifth, or sixth parties ; most of all, to keep in line and in step all who regularly bear the party name. But do you do these things ? Of course you do after a fashion ; but is the success — the “ practical ” success — anything like proportioned to the time, toil, and “ tin ” expended ?

The work has to be done all over again every year. You never feel easy in letting go the handle of a single wire. Nothing seems sure. Some States and districts and cities are hopeless ; their majorities are so enormous, for one side or another, that they have virtually no party contests. But wherever there is any doubt there is a serious doubt; in spite of money, in spite of time, in spite of tact, of intrigue, and of spoils, you get beaten, you, my friends of all parties, you get beaten backwards and forwards, till if one of you is to be called the true blue party, the other should be true black.

It does seem, looking at the politics of the last dozen years, as if it had been nothing but a series of alternate defeats with no victories. Nobody seems to gain any ground ; everybody seems to have to begin all over again. Did you ever read the history of the Wars of the Roses? There were no end of battles: twelve firstclass pitched battles from 1455 to 1485, and any quantity of skirmishes. Sometimes the White Rose was defeated, oftener the Red ; but nobody seemed really to win. The king that nominally won was in constant danger ; the king that nominally lost was sure to turn up again. Four kings departed this life in more rapid succession than English history had known since the Conquest; princes went by the dozen, lords by the score; till, after thirty years of bloodshed, a king, who had no more right to the throne than you or I have, got it because everybody was sick of fighting. And what was the England he had to rule ? An entirely new one, our modern England with scarcely a trace of the old ; the nobility swept away, the burghers all-important, everything regenerated, printing invented, learning revived, the Western isles discovered ; all that the magnificent feudal nobles of England had gained by putting out their entire strength to set one or another Plantagenet on the throne had been the wiping out of nobles, feudalism, and Plantagenets altogether; and the people were satisfied, and had let it all be done without a murmur.

Now your valiant campaigns seem to me very like these. Every party gets defeated ; none wins permanently ; enormous majorities shift over ; whole States change their “column;” tons of money, mountains of pamphlets, Ætnæan craters of fire and breath, are exhausted ; and nobody is killed but the politicians.

Twenty-five years ago, when both parties were at the same game of trying to stand on their historic “ records ” and “principles,” and dodge the immediate issues for fear of disruption, a chief of one of the great parties was urged to set it on one side of a certain great dividing line, and not try to straddle it. “ Oh,” said he, “ that would be very dangerous ; we are not ready for it ; we should lose the State of ” — let us say Fredonia. Since then both the great parties have lost Fredonia back and forwards a dozen times; and why not ? If Fredonia sees that both parties are going to shirk and temporize for the sake of harmony, to preserve a nominal party union which is notoriously unreal; if she sees that, whichever party wins, her sons are sure of good places because they are her sons, while men with every abstract or concrete merit are passed over, because they are from “ sure ” States, why should Fredonia be anything but doubtful ? Why should she not be permanently the middle boy on the tilt, throwing his weight alternately towards one end or the other of the plank ?

And this trouble goes on with you more or less every day. You are working your machines year in and year out to keep the party together, — to get out the party vote. You must see that only Whigs go to the Whig caucuses, that only Tories get on the Tory ticket; and then you must be as sure as possible that all the party votes the straight party ballot. That you expect your machines to effect; if they fail in that, they are good for very little else. But what will you do in view ot the constant changes in your great party masses ? Every year a large percentage of your party will surely die, and you can poll their names only to a limited extent; that part of your machinery is apt to snap and hurt somebody. Another large percentage, though living, is too infirm to vote, even if you put those into carriages who hardly ever saw the inside of one ; and there is coming forward, with startling rapidity, a vast body of voters who were not of age at the last election. What does your machine do to secure these ? We theorists say, “ Educate them ; teach them ; put arguments before them why they should choose one party rather than the other; make new votes, more than balancing the inevitable losses among the old.”

No ; you practical men do not much believe in that. You don’t approve of public talking ; you have to have some of it, but you cut it as short as you can. I have heard one of you — a sensible man, too — say, “ Never make a speech when you can get what you want without.” You cut your campaigns to a minimum so that they can go off with a rush and a hurrah. You do not hold meetings, where people can discuss and learn ; they are all “ rallies; ” that is, if the word means anything, gatherings of those already enlisted on one or the other side.

Yet how are your old party allegiance and devotion to get hold of a young man ? Hamilton has been dead over ninety years ; Jefferson nearly seventy ; Calhoun, Clay, and Webster about fortyfive : the men whom they encountered before the civil war are all gone ; so are Lincoln and his associates and adversaries. All these names are as purely historical to the rising voters as Franklin or Warren, as Cromwell or Strafford; nay, as Cicero or Aristides. We must get hold of the young voters by telling them what they can help us do now, not what the “ party ” did in 1809, or 1829, or 1859, or even 1889. Just as the shift in population forces us to redistrict the States, so the changes in our voters must oblige us to reconstruct our parties down to their very base ; and for that purpose your machines are perfectly useless and unpractical.

Just at this point, I can imagine you jerking this letter across the room with some such exclamation as, “ Oh dear, I see what he ’s coming to : he is going to tell me about the old voters bolting, and the independent movement; perhaps he ’ll say we don’t want parties any more, and such chestnuts.” Why, no, my boy, not at all. In the first place, all that has been said, till you are tired of it, and has come to be almost as commonplace as the party cries themselves. It is very certain that the great mass of the voters enjoy parties and party organizations ; and however useful independency may be as a leaven, you cannot make a loaf of bread of nothing but yeast and salt. We shall continue to work by parties for some time to come, and all I have said relates to the inefficiency of your present machinery, not to the immediate abolition of all machinery. I say that your present machines utilize a very small percentage of that enormous motive power, the spirit of the American people, which you ought to have at your command ; and I think I can make you see what I mean by a comparison.

Twenty years ago there were two general methods of travel, by horses and by steam. Men walked, but it was chiefly for the sake of exercise, and rarely to get from place to place ; at the other end of the line, ballooning was resorted to only in the last exigency, like the siege of Paris, and flying was — in the air. Nowadays, what with bicycles on the one hand and electric railroads on the other, the whole matter of locomotion has been recast ; and some sanguine people tell you horses and steam will never be used again, except so far as the former will feed “ wheelmen,” and the latter run electric engines. Meanwhile, Professor Langley and Mr. Maxim are determined we shall fly.

Now it is perfectly true that the action of a bicyclist is only the combination of human legs with wheels ; and it is as true that no economical method of creating electric currents has been found except the old fuel and steam. But the applications are so entirely novel that a revolution has resulted. It is so in politics, — there are two great motive powers: the energy of individual action, which is like a man’s using his legs, and the force of combined action for a common interest, which is like steam. Politicians have got out of the latter all that their present machinery will effect, and it does not satisfy the people ; they are resorting more and more to independent work or chance combination ; but, like the direct use of legs, whether human or animal, these are not equal to national demands. Ideal non-partisan politics is almost as much in the clouds as flying. We have got to take our legs and our steam, — our wills, so indomitable if irritated, our love of coöperation, so resistless when aroused, — and utilize them by new methods, which shall do what the old ones, already strained and overstrained, are losing their power to accomplish.

Great as have been the advances of electric travel of late years, the advance of bicycling has been greater. Men and women who wish to go from point to point are vastly more independent of public conveyances than they ever were in the days of walking and driving. It is so in politics. The individual voter, the man of local and special organization, is “ feeling his oats ” as he never used to do. His power is going to increase. At the same time, the American people loves combination ; it loves joint action ; it loves to sweep on in great masses under the banner of some uniting cause; but those who study and manage and operate and control such joint action must throw their old mechanism aside, and turn that mighty force, stored in the very hearts of their countrymen, into new channels, and consign their ancient go-carts to the political museums of the future.

Yours, with the most distinguished consideration,

Franklin Eastman.